I/O Performance

Fast SAS hard drives deliver over 200 I/O operations per second at this benchmark; the WD Raptor at its 10,000 RPM answers 120 to 180 requests per second using this benchmark pattern. However, the Mtron 32 GB 2.5" SSD dishes up an amazing 550 I/O operations per second, which is almost four times faster than the WD Raptor!

Web servers require lots of small graphics or html files to be delivered. Conventional hard drives typically are limited to a few hundred I/Os per second. SanDisk's SSD5000 does very well in this benchmark, because it does not involve write access, hence it does not show the achilles heel of these drives. Yet a single Mtron 2.5" SSD performs almost as well as a RAID 0 that consists of two SanDisk SSD5000 drives. Almost 5,000 I/Os per second are more than any simple RAID array could ever deliver.

The database benchmark involves a lot or write access - hence it hits the SanDisk drives hard. Even a WD Raptor looks better than them in the database benchmark pattern. Once again Mtron stands out at ~350 I/O operations per second. You need at least two fast SAS hard drives to answer these I/O requests.

As expected, the Mtron 32 GB 2.5" SSD also delivers great I/O performance in our workstation benchmark, which involves more reads than writes.