The SSD Review The Worlds Dedicated SSD Education and Review Resource | 
SNIA IOPS TESTING
The Storage Networking Industry Association has an entire industry accepted performance test specification for solid state storage devices. Some of the tests are complicated to perform, but they allow us to look at some important performance metrics in a standard, objective way.
SNIA’s Performance Test Specification (PTS) includes IOPS testing, but it is much more comprehensive than just running 4KB writes with IOMeter. SNIA testing is more like a marathon than a sprint. In total, there are 25 rounds of tests, each lasting 56 minutes. Each round consists of 8 different block sizes (512 bytes through 1MB) and 7 different access patterns (100% reads to 100% writes). After 25 rounds are finished (just a bit longer than 23 hours), we record the average performance of 4 rounds after we enter steady state.
- Preconditioning: 3x capacity fill with 128K sequential writes
- Each round is composed of .5K, 4K, 8K, 16K, 32K, 64K, 128K, and 1MB accesses
- Each access size is run at 100%, 95%, 65%, 50%, 35%, 5%, and 0% Read/Write Mixes, each for one minute.
- The test is composed of 25 rounds (one round takes 56 minutes, 25 rounds = 1,400 minutes)
You can check off SNIA as another test where the SSD800MM absolutely destroys the competition. For 50% read/write split at 4KB, it posted an impressive 85K IOPS. At that same 4KB transfer size, with a 95/5 read/write split, the SSD800MM still managed 120K IOPS.
Unlike our other performance tests, the SNIA tests only last for a relatively short period of time each (1 minute), but they cover many more access patterns and transfer sizes. You may have noticed that some of the SNIA results are higher or lower than in our other tests. The reason for this is because SSD performance is heavily predicated on previous workloads. Toggling between large and small blocks and reads to writes is stressful on the drive and results can vary. This is why we take the average of multiple runs. What it does show is how well a drive’s firmware can perform garbage collection, TRIM and many other internal housekeeping tasks.
I’ve long been a proponent of running virtualization environments totally under SSDs. This 12G technology should be the convincer. Would have liked to see some RAID 0 benchmarks run with 4 and 8 SSD units. Curious as to how linear the performance gains would be.
This will come in time and obtaining multiple drives for this report was not possible. We always ask as was obvious with our recent Intel and Adaptec/SMART report where we used 24 Optimus SSDs.
Other sites already did 12 gb/s weeks ago! Did you guys miss that?
Oh really? Perhaps you can send us a link or two to a 12Gbps review (not announcement). Thanks ahead.
These are the first that we are aware of.
Tweaktown and storage review have both already done 12Gbs with the true first 12gbs ssd… the toshiba! This isn’t even the first 12gbs ssd.
You are absolutely correct and thanks. Paul snuck one in there while we were on our way to Computex. Thanks for the heads up!
Three weeks ago….