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 this 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.

Due to the random nature of our Iometer testing the Falcon is a little slower than the Vertex here, although in reality you shoudl expect performance somewhere between the two. Either way, the Falcon is able to produce an impressive combined random read/write speed of 12.67MB/s, more than twenty times the combined random read/write speed of a Spinpoint F1 1TB and almost twice that of the Corsair P256.


Unlike previous generations of SSD where combined read/write latencies were pushed up significantly by poor write latencies, the Falcon benefits from the excellent Indilinx ARM drive controller, which makes for low latencies whatever the work load.


Looking at maximum combined latencies we again see the Falcon come out on top, with an average maximum latency of just 10ms. Again, the reason this is so much lower than the Vertex is likely down to drive wearing and a lack of a TRIM application when we reviewed the Vertex, but it's clear to see that neither drive will present stuttering issues even when tasked with the heaviest combined read/write tasks.