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 Write performance
The biggest challenge for any SSD is .. writing really small files fast, so let's start off there and have look at that with this WRITE test. We scale 4KB block sizes to large 1024KB block sizes in bursts of 32MB with a queue depth of 4 and then measure how fast the storage device is dealing with them. The storage units we used:
- Maxtor 6 Y200M0 200GB
- OCZ Core - First generation SSD 64Gb (MLC)
- WD1500HLFS VelociRaptor
- Silicon Power M10 64GB (MLC)
- Patriot Torqx 128GB (MLC)
We recently added the newest model Western Digital WD1500HLFS VelociRaptor to our test suite, it is the fastest and most expensive 10k RPM HDD your money can get you. It's write performance however is unprecedented good. For a real nice very average experience we dropped the Maxtor in there as well, this represents your typical cheapo HDD, I've colored the mechanical HDD drives in light orange and red.
Now we are not testing the SSD over USB. Being limited to Reads up to 35MB/s and Writes up to 25MB/s is not a proper testing method of the devoices capability and well, not at all interesting. As such we test over the SATA2 port.
In green we are showing the Silicon power M10. Above the write performance. Now due to the lack of cache memory the drive is writing fairly slow (for SSD terms) with the small block files. We do not recommend you to run an OS from the M10, hoeveer we doubt that you use external storage to transfer small <4KB files.
Once we hit 64KB files and bigger the write performance starts to become as advertised.
ATTO Read performance
The previous test was write performance, but let's have a peek at read performance. Here we see the M10 quickly regain performance. On average the read performance of the drive is really good. Making it very suitable as secondary drive to say load you games from.
