Performance in Intel IOMeter

Intel IOMeter: Sequential Read Pattern

The IOMeter program sends to the array a stream of read/write requests 4-requests deep. Once a minute the data block size in this test changes, so that in the end we get the dependence of the linear read and write speeds on the data block size.

For easier results analysis I split the controllers into two groups. The first group includes the controllers from 3ware, SiliconImage, Intel and Adaptec:

As you see, the controller performed very closely to one another. It is hard to single out a leader in this group, however, SiliconImage controller proved much more impressive than the rivals when working with small data blocks.

In the second group we will witness the battle between two eternal rivals: Promise and HighPoint. As I have already mentioned above, Promise controller was tested in two modes (WT and WB), and HighPoint controller - with two different driver versions.

What a curious picture, don’t you think so? If the graphs corresponding to the Promise controller performance hardly look surprising to us (as you remember, we have already discussed the performance of these controller with various caching driver settings in three previous articles), then the HighPoint controller really stood out. With 2.34s driver the controller was awfully slow, however, with the 2.33s driver the situation luckily came to back to norm and the controller performed more or less OK.

Note that the drivers of these two controllers sometimes cause significant drops of the linear read speed for data blocks of a certain size. These “bad” data blocks equal 8KB for Promise controller and 32KB for HighPoint.