X-bit labs

SSD, i-RAM and Traditional Hard Disk Drives (page 5)

Category: Storage

by Aleksey Meyev

[ 04/23/2008 | 08:05 PM ]

Random Read & Write Patterns

Now we’ll see the dependence between the drives’ performance in random read and write modes on the size of the data block size.

• IOMeter: Random Read results (table)
• IOMeter: Random Write results (table)

Here and elsewhere the advantage of the i-RAM over the others is so huge that we had to build two diagrams for each test: one to show all the devices and the other to show all of them without the i-RAM. Otherwise, the graphs of the others just merge into one line when compared to the graph of this very fast device.

It is in this test that we can see the difference between SSDs and HDDs. The SSDs provide much higher speeds than HDDs on every data chuck size except for the largest ones (but small data chinks are the most common in real-life applications). Even the SAS-interfaced 15,000rpm drive from Fujitsu barely stands out among the 7200rpm SATA drives in comparison with the flash-based drives.

The i-RAM is beyond comparison as its random read speed is unachievable for the others.

The Gigabyte i-RAM is again far faster than the others.

As for the Solid State Drives, their writing speed is low due to the lack of buffer memory. As a result, they are much slower even than the 2.5” 7K200.