Three PCI Express-Based SSDs: When SATA 6 Gb/s Is Too Slow

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When it comes time to hunt down the ultimate in storage performance, you simply cannot settle for standard SSDs. Instead, look to PCI Express-based drives that circumvent the limitations of SATA. We have products from Fusion-io, LSI, and OCZ on the bench.

Compression Test: LSI WarpDrive SLP-300

LSI WarpDrive SLP-300 Unused

The freshly-sanitized WarpDrive delivers between 400 and 500 MB/s of write throughput as it works with non-compressible data.

LSI WarpDrive SLP-300 Used

However, write performance drops quite a bit once we repeat the test after hammering it with various heavy workloads. Now we see the write rate fluctuate when working with data that cannot be compressed.

In a worst-case scenario, we’re seeing only 230 MB/s throughput. The average is above 400 MB/s, though. LSI utilizes enterprise-class SandForce SF-1500 controllers, which rely on compression to achieve their best performance; this explains the variance.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos