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.


While random write speeds have in the past been the non-Intel SSD's weak link, the Torqx and Indilinx's latest v1571 firmware prove to be capable with a random write speed of 10.17MB/s. While still a ways off the X25-M,which has been designed specifically for this task, this result is over twice that of the Corsair P256, and ten times that of the Samsung Spinpoint F11TB, making for a stutter free and extremely responsive operating system experience.



As with random read latencies, the latest firmware update seems to have had little impact, with the Torqx and it's v1571 firmware performing identically to the v1370 equipped OCZ Vertex and G.Skill Falcon. Maximum latencies are particularly good, with the drive never taking longer than 10ms to randomly write 4kb of data.