One of the finest tools available to measure storage performance is ATTO. I love it to death as it is so reliable and produces such accurate results. The great thing about ATTO is that we can test with predefined block sizes. So we can test with a 32MB sequence of 4KB files, yet also 32MB in 1MB files. This gives us an excellent scope of overall performance with small and large files.

ATTO Write performance

The most important and difficult task for any SSD is .. writing really small files fast, so let's start off there.

We scale 4KB block sizes to large 1024KB block sizes in bursts of 32MB with a queue depth of 4 and then measure how fast the storage device is dealing with them. The storage units we used:

• Maxtor 6 Y200M0 200GB
• WD1500HLFS VelociRaptor
• Patriot Warp V2 128GB (MLC)
• OCZ Vertex 120GB (MLC)
• Gskill 128GB Falcon (MLC)

We added the newest model Western Digital WD1500HLFS VelociRaptor to our test suite, it is the fastest and most expensive 10k RPM HDD your money can get you. It's write performance however is unprecedentedly good. Colored in yellow.

For a real nice slow experience we dropped the Maxtor in there as well, this is your average cheapo HDD, just follow the light blue line, well at least it's constant ;)

Then in dark Green the Patriot Warp SSD with JMicron controller, which was considered real fast a couple of months ago!

Then in light green the OCZ Vertex SSD and colored in red the G.Skill Falcon SSD. These two are competing with each other head to head.

As you can see, the performance is astounding. The 64MB cache memory just kicks in really hard. It's also a bit tricky for this particular test, since our tested files fit perfectly in the cache .. what is it actually showing? Cache or actual write performance?

None the less, the results don't lie .. that is sheer amazing write performance. Even 4KB files are written much faster than a traditional HDD now, at ~73MB/sec. That's double to triple the speed of any SSD we've tested, thanks to that 64MB cache.

ATTO Read performance

Once we noticed the read performance of the tested unit again were a little flabbergasted. The SSD at best reaches ~240 MB/sec performance. Follow the bright RED line, while we do see the SSD is slower at really small block sizes, again it definitely is much faster than most SSDs we've tested. With a 32KB file size we already jump to more than ~190 MB/sec.

Mind you that the OCZ Vertex and G.Skill Falcon 'should' perform the same. The G.Skill Falcon had a newer firmware, which seems to help a little here and there.