Corsair Force 120 (F120) SSD review - SSD 4KB Performance IO Meter IOPS

IO Meter IOPS performance

New in our tests is IO meter. We brought the ancient application back in rotation as it remains to be the best application to really stress the Random IO performance amongst others of storage devices.

Iometer is a workload creator, it will literally perform massive I/O operations in order to stress the system. To measure random I/O response time as well as total I/O's per second, Iometer is set to use 4KB file size chunks and will completely trash the SSD with random 4KB files, massively stressing the random IO.

We apply our own 4KB Random IO read and write stress test, leave it running for 3 minutes and then note down the average IOPS score in operations per second.

First off read performance. We have very few results as this is a recently added application. If you look at the top four, really good performance. The upper segment is really to close to call.

Now with Random IO 4KB WRITE performance the ball changes completely ... this is EXACTLY where the SandForce controllers kick massive ass, Random IO writes. Both the Corsair P128 (Samsung controller) and original Vertex (Indilinx) run into roughly 2000 operations per second.  All the way at the bottom we see the Silicon Power M10 SSD with JMicron controller (no cache memory) merely 500 write IOPS/sec.

And then look at the new Corsair F210 .. it's nearly six to seven times faster than the Indilinx products at this particular feature, a tiny bit slower compared to the Vertex 2 though. But really, that's a normal margin and from what we understand, OCZ gets first dibs on the Firmwares.

Reference screenshot of how we test