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 32 MB sequence of 4 KB files, yet also 32 MB in 1 MB files. This gives us an excellent scope of overall performance with small and large files.

Let's have a peek at actual read performance. I threw in a competitive Samsung 850 EVO, and for comparison's sake a Western Digital Velociraptor HDD. 

The most important and difficult task for any storage unit is writing really small files fast, so have a look at that with this WRITE test. We scale 4 KB block sizes to 1,024 KB block sizes in bursts of 256 MB with a queue depth of 10 and then measure how fast the storage device deals with them.

The Seagate is a bit of a mess in terms of performance consistency, moving around the platter has that effect. Overall though for mass storage these numbers are fine (for a HDD).