May 25, 2013

Testing the Micron P320h

The Micron P320h SSD is an SLC-based PCIe solid-state storage device which claims to provide the highest read throughput of any server-grade SSD, and at Micron’s request, I recently took some time to put the card through its paces, and the numbers are indeed quite impressive. For reference, the benchmarks for this device were performed [...]

Testing STEC SSD MACH16 200GB SLC

Following my previous benchmark of Samsung 830, today I want to show results for STEC MACH16 SATA card, 200GB size, this card is based on SLC, and regarding STEC website, it is an enterprise grade storage.

Testing Samsung SSD SATA 256GB 830 – not all SSD created equal

I personally like PCIe based Flash, but from a pricing point our customers are looking for cheaper alternatives. SATA SSD is an options. There is many products based on MLC technology, and Intel 320 I would say is the most popular. I do not particularly like its write performance – I wrote about it before, [...]

ext4 vs xfs on SSD

As ext4 is a standard de facto filesystem for many modern Linux system, I am getting a lot of question if this is good for SSD, or something else (i.e. xfs) should be used. Traditionally our recommendation is xfs, and it comes to known problem in ext3, where IO gets serialized per i_node in O_DIRECT [...]

Intel 320 SSD write performance – contd.

I wrote about Intel 320 SSD write performance before, but I was not satisfied with these results. Somewhat each time on Intel 320 SSD I was getting different write performance, so it made me looking into this with details.

Intel 320 SSD read performance

(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 [...]

Aligning IO on a hard disk RAID – the Benchmarks

In the first part of this article I have showed how I align IO, now I want to share results of the benchmark that I have been running to see how much benefit can we get from a proper IO alignment on a 4-disk RAID1+0 with 64k stripe element. I haven’t been running any benchmarks [...]

Virtualization and IO Modes = Extra Complexity

It has taken a years to get a proper integration between operating system kernel, device driver and hardware to get behavior with caches and IO modes correctly. I remember us having a lot of troubles with fsync() not flushing hard drive write cache and so potential hard drives can be lost on power failure. Happily [...]

SSD: Free space and write performance

( cross posting from SSD Performance Blog ) In previous post On Benchmarks on SSD, commenter touched another interesting point. Available free space affects write performance on SSD card significantly. The reason is still garbage collector, which operates more efficiently the more free space you have. Again, to read mode on garbage collector and write [...]

On Benchmarks on SSD

(cross post from SSD Performance Blog ) To get meaningful performance results on SSD storage is not easy task, let’s see why. There is graph from sysbench fileio random write benchmark with 4 threads. The results were taken on PCI-E SSD card ( I do not want to name vendor here, as the problem is [...]