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. The SandForce-1200 controllers based SSDs kicks ass and definitely take a lead in this particular benchmark. But the Vertex 3 has that SandForce 2200 Controller over the SATA 6G interface and look at it take go, indeed reaching advertised speeds.

The storage units we used:

• WD1500HLFS VelociRaptor in light blue
• Corsair F120 (MLC) SF1200 based in light green
• OCZ Vertex 2 100GB (MLC) SandForce SF1200 in yellow
• OCZ RevoDrive X2 240GB in dark blue
• OCZ Vertex 3 PRO 200GB (MLC) SandForce SF2500 in orange
• OCZ Vertex 3 240GB (MLC) SandForce SF2200 in red

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 most 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.

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.

We also included the RAID based RevoDrive X2 which is the fastest SSD based solution we ever tested. In red then, the 'Single' Drive SSD based on SATA 6G - the Vertex 3, as you can see it is an incredibly faster than say the Vertex 2 or Corsair F120 and surprisingly enough, at the same performance level as the Vertex 3 PRO.