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

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.

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