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.

Benchmark Results: Database And File Server I/O Performance

The database benchmark pattern performs 66% reads and 33% writes. All of this is random operation using 8 KB block size.

This is favorable for LSI’s WarpDrive, which easily reaches almost 70 000 I/O operations per second. The Fusion-io ioDrive and the OCZ Ibis are equally fast, but the ioXtreme and the conventional Vertex 2 SSD fall behind quite a bit. These results represent the average I/O performance across all queue depths between one and 64.

File server performance looks similar. In this case, the benchmark applies 80% reads and 100% random operation, but using various block sizes between 512 bytes and 64 KB (512 bytes: 10%, 1 KB: 5%, 2 KB: 5%, 4 KB: 60%, 8 KB: 2%, 16 KB: 4%, 32 KB: 4%, 64 KB: 10%).

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos