HDD 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

Writing really small files fast, let's start off there and have a look at it 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:

• Maxtor 300GB HDD
• WD1500HLFS VelociRaptor HDD
• ADATA S599 100 GB (MLC SSD)
• Samsung SpinPoint F3 2TB HDD

Quite surprising results here. We see the Samsung drive pushing really good numbers. Of course not at SSD level.

However bare in mind that this is a small file-test, the software does not spread out the written data over all platters. It is consistently writing at the fastest part of the platter, and that's where these drives are fast, even at 5400 RPM.

ATTO Read performance

The previous test was write performance, but let's have a peek at read performance.

With read performance we again see similar behavior. Now if you think that the Velociraptor will be equally fast as the Spinpoint , no Sir ... as other tests will show the Random access time for the Velociraptor is 7ms while the Samsung Spinpoint can slow down to 16ms ! And that will hurt. As a linear test though, the Samsung SpinPoint does hold ground.