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 continuously improving, porting and extend the product.

* We have discontinued our File and Web Server tests for client SSD tests, as they employ legacy workloads that are 16 years old (yes, in the year 2000) and are simply no longer representative of modern technology. Specifically, modern storage devices are no longer optimized for <4KB random, yet the outdated Web Server workload applies nearly half (45%) of its workload at those 'wrong' sizes. While it makes for an interesting spread in the results showing artificial penalties with Advanced Format drives optimized for 4KB, those results are just no longer meaningful in modern day enterprise use.

Iometer – IOPS

More sustained tests mean more poor performance from the 600p. To repeat what we mentioned on the previous page, the 600p hates the cache-full condition that many of these tests place it in. Normal use doesn't get an SSD to this state, and we have tests on the next page that will give us more realistic results for this particular SSD.

Iometer – Average Transaction Time

I'm writing this review while on-site at QuakeCon 2016, so there was insufficient time to process latency percentile data for this piece. That data will appear in future comparisons / reviews, so I'm including the legacy average latency results for this one in the interest of time.

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 is a 'misaligned' test, in that it does not adhere to 4k boundaries. This causes some drives to behave oddly. We'll be phasing this test out soon, but for now it's here as an additional data point.

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