X-bit labs

SSD, i-RAM and Traditional Hard Disk Drives (page 7)

Category: Storage

by Aleksey Meyev

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

Multi-Threaded Read & Write Patterns

The multi-threaded tests simulate a situation when there are one to four clients accessing the hard disk at the same time. The depth of the outgoing request queue is varied from 1 to 8. You can follow the links below to see tables with results, but we’ll discuss diagrams for a request queue of 1 as the most illustrative ones. When the queue is longer, the speeds depend but little on the number of applications.

• IOMeter: Multi-threaded Read results (table)
• IOMeter: Multi-threaded Write results (table)

Samsung’s SSDs are slow at reading one thread due to their low speed of sequential reading. When a second thread is added, the HDDs slow down by 33% whereas the SSDs and i-RAM take no notice of the different type of load. As a result, the i-RAM is faster than the Fujitsu MBA3300RC at two threads while the 32GB SSD from Samsung is faster than the Hitachi 7K200.

When there are even more threads to be processed, the Samsung SpinPoint finds itself lagging behind the 32GB SSD.

When writing one thread, the drives are ranked up just like at reading. When we add a second thread, the Fujitsu MBA3300RC slows down heavily and the Hitachi 7K200 is slower too, but the SSDs and the Samsung SpinPoint F1 increase their speed somewhat. The SSDs get close to the 2.5” HDD, and the Fujitsu falls behind the i-RAM and the 1TB HDD.

The SSDs are equal to the Hitachi 7K200 at writing 3 and 4 threads while the i-RAM becomes the leader as the SpinPoint slows down a little.