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.


With minor improvements in both random read and random write speed, it's hardly surprising to find the Torqx and the latest v1571 firmware produce minor improvements in combined read/write speed too. While it's still some way off of the X25-M's performance, it's still a respectable second and shows that even under the heaviest possible read/write circumstances, the Torqx is a very capable bit of kit.



Both average and maximum read/write latencies are excellent, especially the maximum where our clean, fresh and newly updated Torqx is able to produce the lowest maximum latency yet of just 9.73ms.