AnandTech Storage Bench 2011

Last year we introduced our AnandTech Storage Bench, a suite of benchmarks that took traces of real OS/application usage and played them back in a repeatable manner. I assembled the traces myself out of frustration with the majority of what we have today in terms of SSD benchmarks.

Although the AnandTech Storage Bench tests did a good job of characterizing SSD performance, they weren't stressful enough. All of the tests performed less than 10GB of reads/writes and typically involved only 4GB of writes specifically. That's not even enough exceed the spare area on most SSDs. Most canned SSD benchmarks don't even come close to writing a single gigabyte of data, but that doesn't mean that simply writing 4GB is acceptable.

Originally I kept the benchmarks short enough that they wouldn't be a burden to run (~30 minutes) but long enough that they were representative of what a power user might do with their system.

Not too long ago I tweeted that I had created what I referred to as the Mother of All SSD Benchmarks (MOASB). Rather than only writing 4GB of data to the drive, this benchmark writes 106.32GB. It's the load you'd put on a drive after nearly two weeks of constant usage. And it takes a *long* time to run.

1) The MOASB, officially called AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload, mainly focuses on the times when your I/O activity is the highest. There is a lot of downloading and application installing that happens during the course of this test. My thinking was that it's during application installs, file copies, downloading and multitasking with all of this that you can really notice performance differences between drives.

2) I tried to cover as many bases as possible with the software I incorporated into this test. There's a lot of photo editing in Photoshop, HTML editing in Dreamweaver, web browsing, game playing/level loading (Starcraft II & WoW are both a part of the test) as well as general use stuff (application installing, virus scanning). I included a large amount of email downloading, document creation and editing as well. To top it all off I even use Visual Studio 2008 to build Chromium during the test.

The test has 2,168,893 read operations and 1,783,447 write operations. The IO breakdown is as follows:

AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload IO Breakdown
IO Size % of Total
4KB 28%
16KB 10%
32KB 10%
64KB 4%

Only 42% of all operations are sequential, the rest range from pseudo to fully random (with most falling in the pseudo-random category). Average queue depth is 4.625 IOs, with 59% of operations taking place in an IO queue of 1.

Many of you have asked for a better way to really characterize performance. Simply looking at IOPS doesn't really say much. As a result I'm going to be presenting Storage Bench 2011 data in a slightly different way. We'll have performance represented as Average MB/s, with higher numbers being better. At the same time I'll be reporting how long the SSD was busy while running this test. These disk busy graphs will show you exactly how much time was shaved off by using a faster drive vs. a slower one during the course of this test. Finally, I will also break out performance into reads, writes and combined. The reason I do this is to help balance out the fact that this test is unusually write intensive, which can often hide the benefits of a drive with good read performance.

There's also a new light workload for 2011. This is a far more reasonable, typical every day use case benchmark. Lots of web browsing, photo editing (but with a greater focus on photo consumption), video playback as well as some application installs and gaming. This test isn't nearly as write intensive as the MOASB but it's still multiple times more write intensive than what we were running last year.

As always I don't believe that these two benchmarks alone are enough to characterize the performance of a drive, but hopefully along with the rest of our tests they will help provide a better idea.

The testbed for Storage Bench 2011 has changed as well. We're now using a Sandy Bridge platform with full 6Gbps support for these tests.

AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload

We'll start out by looking at average data rate throughout our new heavy workload test:

Heavy Workload 2011 - Average Data Rate

When put to the test the Octane does not disappoint. It's within a couple MB/s of the SF-2281 based Vertex 3, and effectively one of the fastest 6Gbps drives on the market today. I included the old Indilinx Barefoot based Corsair Nova V128 to show just how far Indilinx has come here.

Heavy Workload 2011 - Average Read Speed

Heavy Workload 2011 - Average Write Speed

The next three charts just represent the same data, but in a different manner. Instead of looking at average data rate, we're looking at how long the disk was busy for during this entire test. Note that disk busy time excludes any and all idles, this is just how long the SSD was busy doing something:

Heavy Workload 2011 - Disk Busy Time

Heavy Workload 2011 - Disk Busy Time (Reads)

Heavy Workload 2011 - Disk Busy Time (Writes)

AS-SSD Incompressible Sequential Performance AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Light Workload
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  • jwilliams4200 - Friday, November 25, 2011 - link

    You need to carefully check the dates on that data. It takes a while for this kind of data to trickle in, so you are mostly looking at returns that were sold about a year ago.
  • PubFiction - Saturday, November 26, 2011 - link

    I don't think anandtechs claims about a turn around took place in the last year.

    OCZ has a low rank in most areas it plays in. This reminds me of the fiasco with the different nand in the same product for OCZ and it seemed that alot of people were unhappy with how anandtech was dealing with that. IMO OCZ still has a bad name and I do not touch anything they make unless it is significantly less expensive and reviews fine. I guess the turn around is that OCZ was worse than terrible back then. The amazing thing is that being a bad company seems to pay off because OCZ is aquiring major players in multiple fields meaning they must be making money I guess.
  • jwilliams4200 - Saturday, November 26, 2011 - link

    Sigh. I did not say that OCZ stats will look better for parts sold after April 1, 2011. They may very well look worse. I was just pointing out that the data he was looking at may not reflect what he thought it did. For one thing, it will include very little of the SF22XX BSOD issues.
  • faster - Friday, November 25, 2011 - link

    What a great article. Not only a good technology review, but a great story about the transformation of OCZ. The perspective of this article could only be told by Anand because it was his own story and experience. This was a fantastic piece of writing that gripped me, interested me, and left me feeling good about OCZ. Great job!
  • ericore - Friday, November 25, 2011 - link

    This drive is very slow and relies poorly if you compare it with the Plextor px-m3s. In fact, that drive is probably the best SSD on the market yet Anandtech has never reviewed a single Plextor drive. It comes with a 5 year warranty, and uses a marvel controller. The specs for the 128GB alone are Random Read (IOPS 4K) 70,000, Random Write (IOPS 4K), 50,000 which hands down owns this drive and probably the Crucial M4 variant as well. Yet there has not been a single Plextor review, sadface. Note, Plextor also does a 20 hour burn-in on all drives.
    Also I remember reading the octane uses exclusively designed nand scaled for capacity at the cost of reliability therefore having much shorter lifespan than competition.
    This is a positive step for OCZ though.
  • Beenthere - Friday, November 25, 2011 - link

    It would be useful to see a proper review of the Plextor PX-M3 SSD. Perhaps Plextor hasn't shipped any review drives yet as I don't see any online reviews for them.
  • Fiah - Saturday, November 26, 2011 - link

    This reputable Dutch website reviewed one (I take their reviews as seriously as I do anandtechs)

    http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl...

    They're calling it the fastest SSD yet
  • Beenthere - Saturday, November 26, 2011 - link

    The Dutch site appears to have tested an MP2 model not the M3S - unless Plextor is using odd model numbering in Europe?

    The test data showed the MP2 to be faster in some benches and slower in others. I think we'll need to see Anandtech's or StorageReview.com results to get a clear picture on SSD performance for the M3S.

    I'm not so interested in speed as I am in reliability and compatibility. I have no interest in being an Un-Paid beta tester for PC companies.
  • Beenthere - Saturday, November 26, 2011 - link

    It turns out that the MP2 is not the M3S. SR reviewed the MP2 and it's a middle-of-the pack SSD based on performance. The M3S may actually be slower based on the specs Plextor is quoting. The M3S may be geared more toward enterprise?

    http://www.storagereview.com/plextor_pxm2p_ssd_rev...

    http://www.plextoramericas.com/index.php/ssd/px-m2...

    http://www.plextoramericas.com/index.php/ssd/px-m3...
  • Questor - Sunday, November 27, 2011 - link

    I echo the echo about seeing more smaller capacity SSD reviews. I personally have one 120 GB Intel , one 128 GB Samsung 470 and two 128 GB Plextor SSDs. I am very happy with them but would love to see all the technical stuff you folks here and Anandtech extract from this gear.

    I am also interested in percentage of drive sizes shipping to consumers (IE: what capacitie(s) are consumers buying most and ratio of brand to units shipped for sale, if at all possible).

    I have stayed away from OCZ like it was the next coming of the plague. As a matter of fact, 1) I posted recently on another article I wouldn't touch OCZ until they could make a reliable drive and prove it and...
    2) When someone around me started talking Sandforce and OCZ I would run.
    Your 12 month idea of watching and waiting for reliability results is right along the lines of my thinking.

    Other than those requests, thanks for a great article. It was so interesting, the wife is annoyed I stayed up to finish reading! =O I had better order those roses, come up with a real good verse for the card and get the dinner reseverations ready at some place we can't afford! If I didn't leep doing this, I could afford some 512 GB drives!

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