SSD Performance In The Office: Nine Applications Benchmarked

Features
By Andrew Ku
published

A number of metrics are used to quantify storage performance. If you're a regular Joe, you have to be wondering how such dry terminology can apply to office work. Rather than telling you, we're going to dissect several routine computing tasks.

Microsoft Outlook: Email

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Overall StatisticsMicrosoft Outlook: Downloading Emails
Elapsed Time04:09
Read Operations76
Write Operations643
Data Read1.83 MB
Data Written9.16 MB
Disk Busy Time0.09 s
Average Data Rate128.19 MB/s

Email is a part of our daily routine; it's hard to imagine going a day without Internet access. Our trace consists of leaving a workstation idle and letting Microsoft Outlook automatically download five emails. Overall, that's not a very storage-intensive task. Even though the majority of the operations are random in nature, they're only queued one deep, so an SSD contributes a negligible performance benefit.

I/O Trends:

  • 86% of all operations occur at a queue depth of one
  • 92% of all operations are random
  • 96% of all data transferred is random
  • 44% of all operations are 4 KB in transfer size
  • 28% of all operations are 32 KB in transfer size

Andrew Ku