Mushkin Catalyst Cache SSD review

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 367 Page 6 of 10 Published by

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Performance Atto Disk Benchmark

 

A quick note before we dive into the benchmarks. Since this is a cache device we will run each test three times. Overall performance will gain once data gets cached. Secondly, several WRITE performance tests could not be run as some of the benchmarks require an non-partitioned drive. Since the software can't cache an non-partitioned drive (let alone we need Windows a+ applications on it) we can not run some tests from Sandra, HDtach, HDTune etc.

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.

ATTO Read performance in MB/sec

Mushkin Catalyst Cache SSD

But let's have a peek at actual read performance. I've limited the selection towards a HDD (Velociraptor). In red you'll notice the Mushkin SATA3 SF2281 based SSD, it is a fully fetched SSD when not used as cache, so you'll notice Sandforce 2281 based like performance.

Then in purple, green and and light blue red the cache has been enabled divided in 1st cached run, the 2nd and the 3rd cache run. As you can see we peak well over 500MB/sec, which is surprising.

 

ATTO Write performance in MB/sec

Mushkin Catalyst Cache SSD

When we look at Write performance we still see impressive things. We peak close to 500 Mb/sec. So writing partially seems to be cached. ATTO however is one of the very few benchmarks show results this, quite nice. Let's fire up some real-world stress tests.

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