Breaking Records With SSDs: 16 Intel X25-Es Do 2.2 GB/s

Benchmark Results: I/O Performance

Keep in mind that I/O performance isn’t just limited by the amount of drives but also by the RAID controller and the host system, which has to support a maximum amount of I/O operations per second. In this case, a faster processor would speed up I/O performance even more. The Core i7 920 platform we used isn’t necessarily the best choice, yet we received respectable results.

IOMeter Profile Overview

Database access, which is based on 8 KB block size, 100% random operation, and 67% read operation, delivers 5.6x more performance on the massive 16-drive array than on an individual drive within our system configuration.

The file server profile is based on 100% random access and 80% read operation but various block sizes. The benefit for the massive flash SSD array is a 3.1x performance boost.

Our Web server test is based on 100% random operation and 100% reads at small block sizes typical for small graphics or HTML files. The performance jump is 3.3x.

Overall, it is obvious that a much smaller number of flash SSDs is already sufficient to saturate our test system with four worker threads. Higher I/O performance is most likely possible once you go for a dual quad-core processor system. This would allow one to run eight workers as in Samsung’s project. However, the Samsung guys did not publish I/O performance numbers, so let’s move on to throughput.