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.

Compression Test: LSI WarpDrive SLP-300

LSI WarpDrive SLP-300 Unused

The freshly-sanitized WarpDrive delivers between 400 and 500 MB/s of write throughput as it works with non-compressible data.

LSI WarpDrive SLP-300 Used

However, write performance drops quite a bit once we repeat the test after hammering it with various heavy workloads. Now we see the write rate fluctuate when working with data that cannot be compressed.

In a worst-case scenario, we’re seeing only 230 MB/s throughput. The average is above 400 MB/s, though. LSI utilizes enterprise-class SandForce SF-1500 controllers, which rely on compression to achieve their best performance; this explains the variance.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos