OCZ IBIS 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.

ATTO Write performance

The most important and difficult task for any storage unit is... writing really small files fast, so let's start off there and have a 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 4 and then measure how fast the storage device is dealing with them. The storage units we used:

• WD1500HLFS VelociRaptor in cyan
• Corsair X128 (MLC) Indilinx based in green
• OCZ Vertex 2 100GB (MLC) SandForce SF1200 in yellow
• OCZ IBIS (MLC) 240 GB SI Raid / Sandforce SF1200 x4 in red

We recently added the latest revision of the Western Digital WD1500HLFS VelociRaptor to our test suite, it is considered amongst the fastest and most expensive 10k RPM HDD your money can get you. Its read/write performance is very good good for a traditional/mechanical HDD of course.

Then in green an Indilinx SSD product for comparison, the Corsair X128. Then the SandForce based OCZ Vertex 2 in yellow, MLC based SSD nearing ~250MB/sec write performance.

Then in red the IBIS kicks off with near stratosphere performance! Look at the test and compare it to the a traditional HDD like the Velociraptor, that is just flabbergasting. Remember, this was just the write performance!

ATTO Read performance

The previous test was write performance, but let's have a peek at read performance. The SandForce-1200 controller based SSDs kicks ass and definitely take a lead in this particular benchmark. Now the IBIS starts off a little slow for SSD standards, but the second we pass 8KB block file sizes the OCZ IBIS takes off, it actually manages to push near 742 MB/sec when peaking.

Pfffrt... that's just ridiculous.