Mushkin Callisto 60GB SSD w/ Sandforce SF-1200 Review

IOMeter

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It was originally developed by the Intel Corporation and announced at the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) on February 17, 1998 – since then it got wide spread within the industry. Meanwhile Intel has discontinued work on Iometer and it was given to the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). The project is now driven by an international group of individuals who are continuously improving, porting and extending the product.

Iometer version 2006.07.27 was used for testing and while we tested a dozen different file sizes we will be looking at the ones that are important to Windows users. In the Microsoft Windows operating systems many of the transactions are done at 512B/4kB/8kB/32kB/128kB, with the vast majority at 4kB, then 128kB / 512B, then the rest. Very few Windows applications use transfers larger than 128kB. We began the test by filling the drive completely full of data first and then testing 100% random IOPs in a 4KB region. We set the queue depth to 32 for this test.

Read Performance in IOps

Write Performance in IOps

Benchmark Results: When it comes to write performance it is clear that nearly all of the drives have been optimized to perform best at the 4KB file size. The Mushkin Callisto has comes with firmware that limits the drives 4K write IOps to ~10,000 and we see that to be true here. The OCZ Vertex 2 and Vertex LE drives come with the enterprise firmware that limits the 4K write IOps to ~30,000. You can really see the difference between the firmware versions used here in this benchmark.

Our readers requested that we show just 4K writes in a chart, so here you go! Again you can see that the Mushkin Callisto 60GB drive does better than some SSDs when it comes to 4K write performance, but falls behind several of the other drives since it has been firmware limited.