Intel 510 Series 250GB SSDs Reviewed 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: What a huge difference a RAID 0 configuration makes! In single disk mode, the Intel 510 series reads were excellent, exceeding the rated specifications by 6%. Writes also exceeded specifications by just a hair under 6% as well. In RAID 0 mode, reads darn near exceeded 1000 MB/s which is faster than any storage device we have tested in any configuration by 15%-20% depending on the transfer file size. Clearly, Intel’s firmware is better than that being employed by the Plextor drive.

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: In Iometer, the sequential reads of the 510 Series keeps pace with the new SandForce controllers but the random 4k reads are much weaker. This will be evident in the other tests as well.