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

Features
By Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos
published

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.

Test Procedure And Access Time Results

Test Setup Table

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System Hardware
HardwareDetails
CPUIntel Core i7-920 (Bloomfield), 45 nm, 2.66 GHz, 8 MB Shared L3 Cache
Motherboard (LGA 1366)Supermicro X8SAX, Revision: 1.0, Chipset Intel X58 + ICH10R, BIOS: 1.0B
ControllerIntel ICH10, SATA 6 Gb/s
RAM3 x 1 GB DDR3-1333, Corsair CM3X1024-1333C9DHX
HDDSeagate NL35 400 GB, ST3400832NS, 7200 RPM, SATA 1.5Gb/s, 8 MB Cache
Power SupplyOCZ EliteXstream 800 W, OCZ800EXS-EU
Benchmarks
Performance MeasurementsAS-SSD 1.6.4067 PCMark Vantage 1.0.2.0
I/O PerformanceIOMeter 2008.08.18 Fileserver-Benchmark Webserver-Benchmark Database-Benchmark Workstation-Benchmark Streaming Reads Streaming Writes 4k Random Reads 4k Random Writes
System Software & Drivers
Operating SystemWindows 7 Ultimate Edition

Test Procedure

We added AS SSD as a new benchmark, and we decided to test all devices right out of the box in a fresh state, as well as preconditioned. Here is the procedure:

  1. AS SSD test run 1
  2. Pre conditioning: Iometer random write run (128 KB block size, two hours)
  3. Run full Iometer test suite
  4. Run PCMark Vantage
  5. AS SSD test run 2

Results: Access Time

We provide access time results for the sake of completeness, as these are hardly relevant in most environments. However, it is clear that the Fusion-io drives have advantages, as they do not have to work through SATA and hence show lower latencies. It is also obvious that heavily-used drives show a clear degradation in performance. And lastly, there is not a relevant difference in access time between a conventional SSD like the OCZ Vertex 2 and the PCI Express-based solutions.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos