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 reproduces such accurate results. The great thing about ATTO is that we can test with predefined block sizes. So we can test with a 32 MB sequence of 4KB files, yet also 32 MB in 1MB files. This gives us an excellent scope of overall performance with small and large files.

ATTO Write performance

The most important task for the SSD is ...  writing files. We scale 4KB block sizes towards large 1024KB block sizes in bursts of 32MB and then measure how fast the storage device is dealing with them. The storage units we used:

• Patriot Warp Series SSD v2 MLC (128GB)
• WD1500HLFS Velociraptor (150GB)
• Maxtor 6 Y200M0 (200GB)]
• WD15 00ADFD0 Raptor (150GB)
• G.Skill SSD (64 GB)

We also added the newest model Western Digital WD1500HLFS VelociRaptor into our test suite, it is the fastest and most expensive 10k RPM your money can get you. It's write performance however is unprecedentedly good.

As you can see all SSD drives stumble into their Achilles heel with small file block sizes. For any SSD, small block files are much harder to write fast. But still that's really performance that can be compared to an average 5400 RPM HD.

Once we pass 16KB file sizes ... the SSD catches up quickly. Current word is that, for Windows Vista, a patch is in the works to prevent small block-sizes, which would help greatly. For an MLC SSD the write performance is good above the 16K block size, below that it could be better.

We see that the Patriot WARP drive (red line) indeed surpasses the 100 MB/sec write performance once our files are larger than 32KB.

ATTO Read performance

Once we noticed the read performance of the tested unit we were a little flabbergasted. The Patriot Warp v.2 SSD did indeed reach its advertised 170 MB/sec performance.

Follow the bright RED line, we see the SSD to be slower at really small block sizes again. But here as well, after 8KB file-sizes .... the performance goes into the stratosphere.

That read performance is a very decent amount faster the newest VelociRaptor drive, though admittedly, that one doesn't suck for sure either (blue line). Compared to traditional drives, once we pass 32KB file sizes the WARP SSD just blows it away.

Mind you that the Patriot drive is one of the cheaper MLC drives available. Roughly 80-99 USD per 32GB, yes that is still a lot, we know.