SATA Express Performance on ASUS Hyper Express Drive

By Nathan Kirsch

Anvil Storage Utilities

Anvil Storage Utilities 1.1.0 – Intel Z97 Platform

Along with the move to a new platform, we decided to make a change in one of the benchmarks. There’s a relatively new benchmark called Anvil Storage Utilities that is in beta but close to production. It’s a very powerful tool that measures performance through a variety of tests which can be customized. Since some of the tests more or less duplicate what we get from other benchmarks we use already, we decided to use the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) testing on 4kb file sizes at a queue depth of 4, 16, and 32. IOPS performance is something SSD makers tout quite a bit but we generally don’t do a lot of IOPS testing because frankly a lot of users can’t relate to IOPS metrics as well and it tends to be more meaningful to the enterprise/server crowd. Still, it is another performance indicator with relevance and while some drives post good MB/s numbers, their IOPS scores aren’t always commensurate which this test will prove out.

Anvil SSD Benchmark:

anvil-benchmark

Benchmark Results: The overall Anvil SSD Benchmark score was 1,707.84 on the ASUS Hyper Express 256GB drive.

Queue Depth 4:

anvil-benchmark-random-r4

anvil-benchmark-random-w4

Queue Depth 16:

anvil-benchmark-random-r16

anvil-benchmark-random-w16

Queue Depth 32:

anvil-benchmark-random-r32

anvil-benchmark-random-w32

Benchmark Results: IOPS performance doesn’t appear that how with ~18,800 on the 32QB Random Read test and ~3,900 on the 32QB Random Write test.