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.


The Falcon's Indilinx drive controller means it performs almost identically to the Vertex here, although the fact that our Iometer testing uses random read/writes means that results can be very slightly different (remember we're dealing with tenths and hundredths of a second here!) The Indilinx drive controller has every other MLC based SSD beat right now, delivering a brilliant random read speed of 28.16MB/s, a good deal faster than the P256 and the X25-M.


SSDs are defined by their awesome random read latencies - it's what makes them feel so much faster and more responsive than a conventional hard disk drive. Just like the Vertex, the Falcon performs excellently here, on average taking less than half a millisecond to randomly read any piece of data, in comparison to a hard disk drive's average latency of 21ms! When you multiple this a few times as you would do when a system is booting up and starting multiple programs from random areas on the drive, the difference can be staggering.


Maximum read latencies are similarly low, with the Falcon performing a little faster than the Vertex. This isn't to say the Falcon is faster though, and the result is more likley a product of minor drive wearing on the Vertex and the random nature of the Iometer test pattern. Still, the Falcon comes up trumps with the lowest maximum latency we've yet to record of just 1.3ms.