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 Read performance

But let's have a peek at actual read performance. I've limited the selection of SSDs in this chart to keep things clean and orderly. We use an HDD (WD Velociraptor), an SF1200 series Vertex 2, an SF2200 series Vertex 3 and then the RevoDrive 3 X2. So in all stages of performance we have one product on display, agreed ?

Now the red line is the RevoDrive 3 X2, orange is the yellow the Vertex 3 and soft green is the 'older' Vertex 2 (it shames me to have to say that).

For bold comparison to a FAST HDD we include the Western Digital WD1500HLFS VelociRaptor to our test suite, it is considered amongst the fastest and more expensive 10k RPM HDD your money can get you. Its read/write performance is very good for a traditional/mechanical HDD of course. So bare in mind that your generic HDD is quite a bit slower.

Absolutely crazy stuff to see ... the X2 closes in on 1500 MB/sec.

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 from 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.

Again silly stuff, roughly 1200~1230 MB/sec for write performance.