Anvil's Storage Utilities

[Ao1]

First, a sincere apology to Anvil for derailing his thread and detracting from ASU, which is a great benchmark for end users, providing flexibility and ease of use.

The SNIA tests are beyond an end users ability to undertake, but I believe this is the benchmark that vendors should use for their specifications. The benchmark is something that all major SSD vendors have contributed towards and it provides granularity and comparative performance assessments that are beyond any other method of testing.

Here is a shot of 17 drives that were tested with the SNIA specification using 65% reads/ 35% writes. (17 SSD’s and one Enterprise HDD [edit: in yellow]) It is clear to see that there is a significant difference in performance between SSD’s.


http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/23848%20

Here is a shot of a Sandforce drive. Blue is incompressible. Red is a data base pattern and the green line is 0 fill. Interestingly 0 fill is close to the data base load, but the max IOPS come out at ~35K. Sandforce specify 60,000 burst/20,000 sustained (@4K blocks) for the SF2x drives and 30,000 burst/10,000 sustained (@4K blocks) for SF1x drives.



Sandforce don’t state how they arrived at their specification figures, but presumably they were obtained on a FOB drive using 0 fill. The SNIA test is based on steady state, which is the representative condition of a drive in use.

To prevent Anvil’s thread from being further derailed there should be a separate thread to discuss SNIA. There is already a thread to discuss SF compression.