Random Performance – Iometer (IOPS/latency), YAPT (random)

We are trying something different here. Folks tend to not like to click through pages and pages of benchmarks, so I'm going to weed out those that show little to no delta across different units (PCMark). I'm also going to group results performance trait tested. Here are the random access results:

Iometer:

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It was originally developed by the Intel Corporation and announced at the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) on February 17, 1998 – since then it got wide spread within the industry. Intel later discontinued work on Iometer and passed it onto the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). In November 2001, code was dropped on SourceForge.net. Since the relaunch in February 2003, the project is driven by an international group of individuals who are continuesly improving, porting and extend the product.

Iometer – IOPS

iometer-ios-file.png

iometer-ios-web.png

iometer-ios-database.png

iometer-ios-workstation.png

Despite having three CPU cores dedicated to background tasks, the single remaining core just doesn't scale to very high IOPS whenever writes are present (all but the Web Server test). This means that for multi-threaded workloads including writes, the Phison S10 controlled SSDs turn in results roughly half of the competing units.

Iometer – Average Transaction Time

For SSD reviews, HDD results are removed here as they throw the scale too far to tell any meaningful difference in the results. Queue depth has been reduced to 8 to further clarify the results (especially as typical consumer workloads rarely exceed QD=8). Some notes for interpreting results:

  • Times measured at QD=1 can double as a value of seek time (in HDD terms, that is).
  • A 'flatter' line means that drive will scale better and ramp up its IOPS when hit with multiple requests simultaneously, especially if that line falls lower than competing units.

iometer-trans-file.png

iometer-trans-web.png

iometer-trans-database.png

iometer-trans-workstation.png

YAPT (random)

YAPT (yet another performance test) is a benchmark recommended by a pair of drive manufacturers and was incredibly difficult to locate as it hasn't been updated or used in quite some time.  That doesn't make it irrelevant by any means though, as the benchmark is quite useful.  It creates a test file of about 100 MB in size and runs both random and sequential read and write tests with it while changing the data I/O size in the process.  The misaligned nature of this test exposes the read-modify-write performance of SSDs and Advanced Format HDDs.

yapt-randreads.png

yapt-randwrites.png

This test has no regard for 4k alignment, and it brings many SSDs to their knees rather quickly. That said, the Phison S10 performed surprisingly well with misaligned IO – especially misaligned writes. Modern operating systems will align larger accesses to 4k boundaries, but smaller IO (file table writes, etc) may not be, and Phison's firmware appears to handle this better than others. This does come at some cost though, evidenced by the HDTach / HDTune results we saw earlier in this review.

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