Results: Enterprise Video Streaming Performance
Video streaming is a demanding workload within the enterprise space. Companies want more HD streams with higher bit-rates and no stuttering. A storage solution well-suited for enterprise-class video delivery has completely different capabilities than something designed for databases. At the end of the day, you're basically looking for exceptional large-block sequential write performance. You also need a high level of consistency that traditionally isn't seen from consumer SSDs. For a more in-depth analysis, take a look at page 10 of Intel SSD 910 Review: PCI Express-Based Enterprise Storage.
Once the drive is in a steady state, we write its entire capacity 100 times. We use 8 MB transfer sizes and a queue depth of four, recording timestamps for each individual write. The graph below reflects 100-point averaging, so that you can better visualize the results.
As we saw in our performance consistency test, the drive's video streaming performance is also excellent. Not only does it easily meet the specification, but it goes beyond. We measured an average in excess of 1950 MB/s at a consistent rate, and we calculated that we could maintain that average with very little buffering (<64 MB). In other words, the SSD DC P3700 can handle three simultaneous streams of uncompressed 4K video at 30 FPS!
