Intel series 320 SSD review - 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 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.

Above, READ performance managed with ATTO. The SandForce-1200 series controller based Vertex 2 SSDs kicks ass, however the all new SATA 300 / 6G SandForce 2200 series SSD like the Vertex 3 are... astonishing.

Intel is doing well with the Series 320. All SSDs are really fast, but for today's tested drive that's 284 MB/sec read performance when it's peaking. Remember we are stalking about a SATA2 based product here.

Compare a little with the traditional HDD, the WD Velociraptor has been included (light blue).

The most important and difficult task for any storage unit is... writing really small files fast, so let's start off there and have look at that with this WRITE test. We scale 4KB block sizes to 1024KB block sizes in bursts of 256MB with a queue depth of 10 and then measure how fast the storage device is dealing with them.

The new Vertex 3 is leaving everything behind, and the Intel 320 can't keep up for sure, but still it's managing a cool 228 MB/sec.