February 23, 2012

Intel 320 SSD read performance

July 29, 2011 By 10 Comments

(this is cross-post from http://www.ssdperformanceblog.com/)
While PCI-e Flash cards show great performance, I am often asked about alternatives, as price for PCI-e cards is still significant and not acceptable for small companies and startups.

Intel 320 SSD appears to be a popular drive with a quite acceptable price.
I wrote about write performance of these cards, and now let’s take look on a random read workload.

I used a Cisco UCS C250 as base hardware, comparing in it:

  • regular RAID10 over 8 SAS 2.5 disks
  • single Intel 320 SSD directly attached to a HighPoint RocketRAID 2300
  • two Intel 320 SSD in hardware RAID0 mode, attached to a LSI SAS9211-4i controller

For simulating the workload I used sysbench’s fileio random reads. Scripts and raw results available on Launchpad.

Let’s see throughput results:

Throughput, MiB/sec (more is better)
threads Intel 320 Intel 320 2 strip RAID10 ratio Intel 320 / RAID10 ratio Intel 320 2 strip / RAID10
1 30.27 31.18 3.75 8.07 8.31
2 55.18 60.49 6.98 7.91 8.67
4 95.13 112.85 12.10 7.86 9.33
8 143.58 191.64 19.05 7.54 10.06
16 174.75 277.70 26.70 6.54 10.40
32 174.60 351.84 32.90 5.31 10.69

And response times:

95% response time, ms (less is better)
threads Intel 320 SSD Intel 320 SSD strip RAID ratio RAID/Intel 320 ratio RAID/Intel 320 strip
1 0.53 0.56 6.13 11.57 10.95
2 0.72 0.59 7.27 10.10 12.32
4 0.89 0.74 10.07 11.31 13.61
8 1.24 0.95 15.63 12.60 16.45
16 1.76 1.38 25.52 14.50 18.49
32 3.33 2.15 47.35 14.22 22.02

As conclusion, this card provides great read performance. A single card provides 5-8x better throughput and 10-14x better response time. Striping helps to increase throughput in 8-10x and response time in 10-22x.

While there are questions about write performance (see my previous post), I think this card is very suitable for read-intensive tasks, where you can expect significant improvements.




Filed Under: Benchmarks, Hardware and Storage
About Vadim Tkachenko

Vadim leads Percona's development group, which produces the Percona Server and Percona XtraBackup. He is an expert in solid-state storage, and has helped many hardware and software providers succeed in the MySQL market.

Comments

  1. Dathan Pattishall says:
    July 29, 2011 at 5:38 pm

    FYI: Your previous post link is broken, http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/07/29/intel-320-ssd-read-performance/%3Ca%20href=

  2. Vadim Tkachenko says:
    July 29, 2011 at 5:45 pm

    Dathan,

    Fixed, thanks.

  3. Will Gunty says:
    July 29, 2011 at 6:15 pm

    Vadim,

    You mention this as an alternative to PCI-E cards. How do they compare, performance-wise, to these SSDs?

  4. George says:
    July 29, 2011 at 11:38 pm

    Thanks for the benchmark results, would be interesting to see how your 160GB Intel 320 SSD compares with the faster and higher capacity 300GB and 600GB Intel 320 SSD models which on random writes is slightly faster at 23K IOPS vs 21K IOPS and write sequential speed is at 205-220MB/s vs 160GB model’s 165MB/s http://www.anandtech.com/show/4244/intel-ssd-320-review

  5. Peter Zaitsev says:
    July 30, 2011 at 8:03 am

    Vadim,

    I wonder how it compares to FusionIO and Virident from the top side ?

    Also you did not specify the block size you used ? Is this standard sysbench with 16KB block ?

  6. Vadim Tkachenko says:
    July 30, 2011 at 12:52 pm

    Peter,

    it is 16K block size.
    I have data for FusionIO 320GB MLC, just need to prepare report.
    As for numbers for FusionIO:

    8 threads: ~250 MiB/sec
    16 threads: 300 MiB/sec
    32 threads: 450 MiB/sec
    64 threads: 500 MiB/sec

    However it is interesting, as for some threads I have *unstable* results for read-only workloads with FusionIO.

  7. Vadim Tkachenko says:
    July 30, 2011 at 5:53 pm

    Will,

    you can find some results there
    http://www.ssdperformanceblog.com/2011/06/fusionio-320gb-mlc-random-write-performance/
    http://www.ssdperformanceblog.com/2011/06/intel-320-ssd-random-write-performance/

    While you consider only raw performance, SATA cards may not look as alternative, but you should consider price also. For many users $10K+ for PCI-E cards is out of budget range, while 300-500$ for Intel 320 SSD is acceptable.

  8. Jestep says:
    August 1, 2011 at 8:32 am

    On a comparative question, I’m not clear on why a RAID 10 would be compared to a single drive or RAID 0 SSD array, unless it’s just a baseline for standard RAID performance.

    RAID 10 is pretty much the preferred RAID method as far as real world spinning drive implementation goes, but I’m not sure I would trust a single drive SSD much more than I would trust a standard single drive, moving parts or not. It seems intuitive that SSD would stomp any traditional setup but neither of these seem like a failure proof setup to be comparing with.

  9. David Zotter says:
    August 1, 2011 at 2:42 pm

    ….just for fun, can you graph out the Fusion IO to show relative performance?

  10. Sergiy Bobok says:
    September 27, 2011 at 12:14 pm

    Unfortunately the high cost of SSD doesn’t take advantage of the covenant in speed. Interesting comparison, the speed and volume of record described http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm

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