Plextor M6e 256GB M.2 PCIe SSDs in RAID – Hitting 1.4GB/s

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.

Single Drive:

Software RAID0:

Benchmark Results: The overall Anvil SSD Benchmark score for the single Plextor M6e 256GB drive was 4,767 with 100% compression (incompressible data). With the second drive installed and run with striped mode our score jumped up to 7,110! Anvil’s Storage Utilities shows that we were getting 1,408MB/s in the sequential 4MB read test, which is wicked fast. The 4K random test was down at just 32MB/s though, which is similar to the findings that we got in AS SSD.