The SSD Review The Worlds Dedicated SSD Education and Review Resource | 
SERVER PROFILES
While synthetic 100% read or 100% write workloads do a great job of testing the underlying technology and reporting easy to understand results, they aren’t always indicative of how the drive will be used by the end user. Workloads that simulate enterprise environments try to bridge that gap without being overly complex. The process of measuring our server workload performance is the same as measuring random. 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 respective server workload at QD256 until the drive is in a steady state. Finally, we cycle through QD1-256 for 5 minutes each measuring performance. All this is scripted to run with no breaks in between. The last hour of our preconditioning, the average IOPS, and average latency for each QD is graphed below.
The Database profile is 8K transfers, and 67% percent of operations are reads.
Here we can see that the HK4E is flexing its muscle. It delivers much better performance numbers than the SM863 from QD2-32 with there being an 8-10K IOPS difference at QD8! Both of these drives leave the M510DC in the dust. Latency even remains under 1ms at QD 32 and it achieved about 35K IOPS as well.
The Email Server profile is similar to the Database profile, only it 8K transfers at 50% reads and 50% writes.
The HK4E’s consistency is very good in this test. The HK4E again outshines the SM863 from QD2 on. As early as QD 4 it was at 20K IOPS and at QD32 it was delivering over 35K IOPS at 1ms latency.