Corsair Performance 3 Series 128GB SSD Review in RAID 0

ATTO & Iometer Synthetic Benchmarks

ATTO v2.41

ATTO is one of the oldest drive benchmarks still being used today and is still very relevant in the SSD world. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that can be very easily interpreted. The test was run with the default runs of 0.5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes with the total length being 256mb.

ATTO – Intel P67 Platform

ATTO – Intel P67 Platform (RAID 0)

Benchmark Results: While the scores here are excellent, it’s obvious that the firmware employed by the Intel 510 drives is superior and the Corsair Performance 3 Series is nearly dead on the Plextor M2 scores so they are using very similar or even identical firmware versions. RAID 0 performance is still very good.

ATTO – Intel P67 Platform (partially filled with data)

Interestingly enough, Corsair told us that the drives perform better with data on it and based on the above results, we’d say they are accurate in their assessment. ATTO seemed to show the biggest performance gain whereas the others showed modest if any difference.

Iometer 2008 (1.1.0)

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It was originally developed by the Intel Corporation who has since discontinued work on Iometer and it was ultimately turned over to the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). We chose the file sizes that best reflect many of the Windows transactions. 4KB random read/writes is very common on every day user machines. Large sequential writes represent large file copies. The drive block size is 512kb so it should give a very good indication of peak performance. We set the queue depth to 4 for the tests as generally Windows operations tend to happen at queue depths of 5 or less.

Benchmark Results: Again the Performance 3 drives score nearly identical to the Plextor and in RAID 0 mode, very close to the Intel in reads and slightly behind in writes.