Intel SSD 545s 512GB SATA SSD Review – 64-Layer TLC NAND

By Nathan Kirsch

Anvil Storage Utilities

Anvil Storage Utilities 1.1.0

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 1, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128. 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 with 100% Compression (incompressible data):

Benchmark Results: The Anvil SSD Benchmark showed that with 100% compression (incompressible data) the Intel SSD 545s 512GB SATA drive was able to achieve a score of 4,684.16 points with 516 MB/s read and 464 MB/s read speeds when it comes to the measured sequential performance with 4MB file sizes.

Anvil SSD Applications Benchmark at 46% Compression:

Benchmark Results: With the compression at 46% to help mimic real world applications better we found the overall score remained basically the same at 4,644.91 points.

Benchmark Results: We used Anvil to check the 4K Random Read performance and found we we topped out at 79,000 IOPS, which is actually just over the drives rated maximum 4K Random Read IOPS of up to 75K.

Benchmark Results: When it came to 4K Random Write performance, the Intel SSD 545s 512GB drive topped out at 85,900 IOPS at QD16 and that is just below the drives rated 90k IOPS for maximum 4K Random Write performance.