Intel DC P3520 Enterprise NVMe SSD Review (1.2TB) – With 3D NAND Comes Value

8KB RANDOM READ/WRITE

To measure 8KB random read/write performance do the same preconditioning as we did for 4KB performance. The drive is first secure erased to get it in a clean state. Next, the drive is filled by sequentially writing to the RAW NAND capacity twice. We then precondition the drive with 8KB random writes at QD256 until the drive is in a steady state. Finally, we cycle through QD1-256 for 5 minutes each for writes and then reads. All this is scripted to run with no breaks in between. The last hour of preconditioning, the average IOPS, and average latency for each QD is graphed below.

The 8K write preconditioning results follow similar to that of the 4K results. Here we can see a performance distribution of about 4-5K IOPS and latency up to 20ms on average.

Just as it did during the 4K read testing, the Intel DC P3520 shows good 8K read performance from QD1-16. After that, however, the performance trails behind other PCIe SSDs we have tested. At QD256 it averaged just over 210K IOPs.

Again, during writes, the Intel delivers the same 16K IOPS performance whether it be at QD1 or QD64 at 8K, the only difference is that latency simply increases.