IO meter setup guide...some average results on various systems also post here

[Tony]

There is a ton of confusion about what benchmark to believe is best for measuring the outright speed of an SSD or SSD raid array. Here I will show you how to set up IO meter to give you an accurate repeatable benchmark result.

Outright speed = sequential speed, reading from or writing to each block.

Each block is 512k in size, so the fastest file to read or write will be 512k in size.

Setting up IOmeter

To start grab IOmeter here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/iome...4.zip/download

seems this is the 32bit version: http://sourceforge.net/projects/iome...n.zip/download

This version does win64 and win32. Unzip it and migrate to the SRC folder, then Release here you will find Iometer.exe, just right click on it and choose send to desktop create shortcut and you are good to go.

I Always run Iometer with admin rights, to do this within win7 or vista just right click the shortcut and run as administrator

I am going to make life easy for you all by uploading some config files.
These will be:

512k_seq_ write for measuring outright drive write speed.
512k_seq_ read for measuring outright drive read speed
bootup which gives an good representation of drive speed within a modern windows OS
4K_ran_write which is the industry standard random write test
4k_ran_read which is the industry standard random read test

Easy pictorial guide to installing and using IOmeter

Open IOmeter by clicking on the desktop icon, remember I run as administrator.






















1 = the total IO/s throughput during the test

2 = the max MB/s the drives delivered during the test

3 = the average response time during the test...smaller = better

4 = max response time during the test...remember during the test response times go up and down...this is the highest it peaked during the test.

5 = how much CPU use the test needed to run

6 = error count, if you see errors something is very wrong.

Once each test has run close IOmeter, go to the drive you tested and delete the iobw.tst file, also remove it from the Recycle bin if needed. You MUST do this between all tests.

[Tony]

Some test files to use within IOmeter

the 512K files will show the max read and max write your drives are delivering.

[Tony]

Drives are for the OS, have been battered over the past 2 days FW testing.





232MB/s writes
421MB/s reads

If you get better than me well done, if you are close or just below then you are in the ball park.

[Tony]

Note the chipset limit here is around 630MB/s writes and 660MB/s reads, I could add 10 more drives and it would not go higher. Usually 4 120GB drives comes close to maxing out ICH10, I am running 6 to stress test the sata raid controller.

This array is the OS drive, NOT a spare.






674MB/s Reads
632MB/s Writes

Right on the limit of the chipset.

[HDCHOPPER]

Most exellent Tony Thank you

[Tony]

bottom test is writes not reads..sorry

226MB reads
135MB/s writes

[Tony]

2 drives is fine on this card, 3 and 4 push it to far if they are 120's or 250's.

Raid 0, 128K stripe, win7 64 OS loaded to the array, just started testing so this is cleanish drives.





458MB/s Reads
270MB/s writes

[RyderOCZ]

Well, it looks like even 18 month old laptops with ICH8 can be effected by "SATA 150".

My results below definitely show that the chipset is holding this system back.

This will at least give you guys some idea about what to expect from the Summit drives. I am testing here in AHCI mode, full Windows 7 install, all current updates for the OS. I literally installed the OS and ran the benchmarks, I have not turned anything off (still has pagefile, index, prefetcher, etc.)