Iometer Results

Website: Iometer

Iometer is a powerful open source synthetic benchmarking tool, able to simulate the effects of a wide variety of software loads and circumstances on either individual hard disk drives and complete drive arrays. In the past we've chosen not to include it due to bit-tech's traditional preference towards real world benchmarks. However, to correctly check for drive stutter caused by extremely high random write latencies there aren't a great deal of options, so we've finally decided to include Iometer in our hard disk testing suite.

For our Iometer testing we used a 4GB portion of the drive and subjected it to random read or write commands or both, depending on the test, of 4KB, with three outstanding I/Os to simulate high level multi-tasking. We ran each test for two minutes, repeating three times to ensure we recorded an accurate result.

As the differences in read and write latencies and speeds can be so pronounced, we've also included tables of information where appropriate, to help make understanding the random read/write performance differences between different SSDs and conventional hard disk drives easier.


Random read speed is where SSDs get to shine and that's no exception for the Corsair P256. While a little slower at random read than the OCZ Vertex it's still just faster than the X25-M using the latest firmware. In comparison conventional hard disk drives barley register, so it's easy to see the big advantage of an SSD when reading large numbers of small random files, such as when booting Windows Vista.


Average response times for randomly reading 4KB of data are again, as fast as we'd expect, with the mechanical hard drives far behind. Multiply these results by a few thousand times when your system is reading huge batches of small files and you have an enormous performance advantage for SSDs.


Maximum random read latencies for the Corsair P256 are only 1ms more than the average, and are bettered by the Intel X25-M, although the difference in real world performance between all the SSDs here is minimal.