Intel series 320 SSD review

IO Meter IOPS performance

IO meter, results vary per website since everybody configures this test differently. We brought the ancient application back into rotation as it remains the best application to really stress the random IO performance amongst others for 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/Os 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 1 minute and then note down the average IOPS score in operations per second.

Above, write performance - Now with random IO 4KB WRITE performance, this is where the SandForce controllers typically kick massive ass, with the Marvel controllers not so much, with a cache memory chip.

Where we had slower numbers with the PRO version, it seems that this SSD pushes roughly 16000 IOs (Random) with each second that passes. It seems that everybody is using IOMeter's parameters slightly differently, but that is more than expected TBH.

Still, it's half that of a SandForce based product which these days push 35~60k IOs.

Above, read performance - actually that's good performance right there for this type of controller, though below the expected 4KB random write IOPS. The CPU usage was a little high during this test (Core i7 2600K processor), but this test is so intense it could kill off a mid-range system really.

AS SSD Benchmark

Added to the benchmark suite is this nice little German application called AS SSD Benchmark. This test gives an extensive result set. The test is popular, but probably not the best one out there. So just for reference here we go.

Nothing to compare to yet, but we did run some other tests with other SSDs and performance is up-to speed alright.