5 - SSD Performance Atto Disk Benchmark

Atto Disk Benchmark

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

ATTO Write performance:

Really, the most important task for the SSD would be writing files. We scale from 4KB block sizes towards large 1024KB block sizes in bursts of 32MB. The storage units we used:

• Samsung SP0802N ATA (80 GB)
• Maxtor 6 Y200M0 (200GB)]
• WD15 00ADFD0 Raptor (150GB)
• OCZ CORE SSD (64GB)
• Silicon Power SSD SLC (32GB)

As you can see we immediately stumble into the biggest problem for any SSD, small block files are much harder to write fast. But still that's really performance that can be compared to an average 5400 RPM HD.

Once we pass 16KB file sizes ... the Silicon Power SSD starts shining. Current word is that for Windows Vista a patch is in the works to prevent small block-sizes, which would help greatly. For an SLC SSD the write performance is good above the 16K block size, below that it could be better.

ATTO Read performance:

Prepare to be stunned once we look at read performance of the tested unit. Follow the red line, now again we see the SSD to be slower at really small block sizes. But here as well, after 16KB file-sizes .... the performance goes into the stratosphere.

 That read performance is twice as fast compared to a WD Raptor.