A Look at Enterprise Performance of Intel SSDs
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 8, 2012 6:36 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- IT Computing
- SSDs
- Intel
Enterprise Storage Bench - Oracle Swingbench
We begin with a popular benchmark from our server reviews: the Oracle Swingbench. This is a pretty typical OLTP workload that focuses on servers with a light to medium workload of 100 - 150 concurrent users. The database size is fairly small at 10GB, however the workload is absolutely brutal.
Swingbench consists of over 1.28 million read IOs and 3.55 million writes. The read/write GB ratio is nearly 1:1 (bigger reads than writes). Parallelism in this workload comes through aggregating IOs as 88% of the operations in this benchmark are 8KB or smaller. This test is actually something we use in our CPU reviews so its queue depth averages only 1.33. We will be following up with a version that features a much higher queue depth in the future.
SLC NAND offers great write latency and we see a definite advantage to the older drive here in our Swingbench test. Only a 6Gbps SSD 520 is able to deliver better performance, everything else trails the 3+ year old drive. Note that the Marvell based Intel SSD 510, even on a 6Gbps controller, is the slowest drive in Intel's lineup. From a write amplification perspective, Marvell's controller has always been significantly behind Intel's own creations so the drop in performance isn't surprising. The 710 actually delivers performance that's lower than the 320, but you do get much better endurance out of the 710.
While throughput isn't much better on the 6Gbps Intel SSD 520, average service time is tangibly lower. There's clearly a benefit to higher bandwidth IO interfaces in the enterprise space, which is a big reason we're seeing a tremendous push for PCIe based SSDs. The 710 does well here but not nearly as well as the X25-E which continues to behave like a modern SSD thanks to its SLC NAND.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, February 9, 2012 - link
Given enough spare area and a good enough SSD controller, TRIM isn't as important. It's still nice to have, but it's more of a concern on a drive where you're running much closer to capacity. Take the Intel SSD 710 in our benchmarks for example. We're putting a ~60GB data set on a 200GB drive with 320GB of NAND. With enough spare area it's possible to maintain low write amplification without TRIM. That's not to say that it's not valuable, but for the discussion today it's not at the top of the list.The beauty of covering the enterprise SSD space is that you avoid a lot of the high write amp controllers to begin with and extra spare area isn't unheard of. Try selling a 320GB consumer SSD with only 200GB of capacity and things look quite different :-P
Take care,
Anand
Stuka87 - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - link
Great article Anand, I have been waiting for one like this. It will really come in handy to refer back to myself, and refer others too when they ask about SSD's in an enterprise environment.Iketh - Thursday, February 9, 2012 - link
Anand's nickname should be Magnitude or the OOM Guy.wrednys - Thursday, February 9, 2012 - link
What's going on with the media wear indicator on the first screenshot? 656%?Or is the data meaningless before the first E4 reset?
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, February 9, 2012 - link
Great article Anand, very interesting stuff!ssj3gohan - Thursday, February 9, 2012 - link
So... something I'm missing entirely in the article: what is your estimate of write amplification for the various drives? Like you said in another comment, typical workloads on Sandforce usually see WA < 1.0, while in this article it seems to be squarely above 1. Why is that, what is your estimate of the exact value and can you show us a workload that would actually benefit from Sandforce?This is very important, because with any reliability qualms out of the way the intel SSD 520 could be a solid recommendation for certain kinds of workloads. This article does not show any benefit to the 520.
Christopher29 - Thursday, February 9, 2012 - link
Members of this forum are testing (Anvil) SSDs with VERY extreme workloads. X25-V40GB (Intel drive) has already 685 TB WRITES ! This is WAY more than 5TB suggested by Intel. They also fill drives completely! This means that your 120GB SSDs (limited even to 100GB) could withstand almost 1 PB writes. One of their 40GB Intel 320 failed after writting 400TB!Corsair Force 3 120GB has already 1050TB writes! You shoul reconsider your assumptions, because it seems that those drives (and large ones especially) will last much longer.
Stats for today:
- Intel 320 40GB – 400TB (dead)
- Samsung 470 64GB – 490TB (dead)
- Crucial M4 64GB – 780TB (dead)
- Crucial M225 60GB – 840TB (dead)
- Corsair F40A - 210TB (dead)
- Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 60GB – 480TB (dead)
- Corsair Force 3 120GB – 1050TB (1 PB! and still going)
- Kingston SSDNow 40GB (X25-V) (34nm) - 640TB
SOURCE:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...
Christopher29 - Thursday, February 9, 2012 - link
PS: And also interestingly Force 3 (that lasted longest) is exactly SF-2281 drive? So what is it in reality Anand, does this mean that SF do write less and therefore SSD last longer?Death666Angel - Thursday, February 9, 2012 - link
In every sentence, he commented how he was being conservative and that real numbers would likely be higher. However, given the sensitive nature of business data/storage needs, I think most of them are conservative and rightly so. The mentioned p/e cycles are also just estimates and likely vary a lot. Without anyone showing 1000 Force 3 drives doing over 1PB, that number is pretty much useless for such an article. :-)Kristian Vättö - Thursday, February 9, 2012 - link
I agree. In this case, it's better to underestimate than overestimate.