Intel 320 SSD read performance

July 30, 2011

Author

Vadim Tkachenko

Benchmarks

Hardware and Storage

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(this is cross-post from https://www.percona.com/blog/)
While PCI-e Flash cards show great performance, I am often asked about alternatives, as price for PCI-e cards is still significant and not acceptable for small companies and startups.

Intel 320 SSD appears to be a popular drive with a quite acceptable price.
I wrote about write performance of these cards, and now let’s take look on a random read workload.

I used a Cisco UCS C250 as base hardware, comparing in it:

- regular RAID10 over 8 SAS 2.5 disks

- single Intel 320 SSD directly attached to a HighPoint RocketRAID 2300

- two Intel 320 SSD in hardware RAID0 mode, attached to a LSI SAS9211-4i controller

For simulating the workload I used sysbench’s fileio random reads. Scripts and raw results available on Launchpad.

Let’s see throughput results:

Throughput, MiB/sec (more is better)
threads	Intel 320	Intel 320 2 strip	RAID10	ratio Intel 320 / RAID10	ratio Intel 320 2 strip / RAID10
1	30.27	31.18	3.75	8.07	8.31
2	55.18	60.49	6.98	7.91	8.67
4	95.13	112.85	12.10	7.86	9.33
8	143.58	191.64	19.05	7.54	10.06
16	174.75	277.70	26.70	6.54	10.40
32	174.60	351.84	32.90	5.31	10.69

And response times:

95% response time, ms (less is better)
threads	Intel 320 SSD	Intel 320 SSD strip	RAID	ratio RAID/Intel 320	ratio RAID/Intel 320 strip
1	0.53	0.56	6.13	11.57	10.95
2	0.72	0.59	7.27	10.10	12.32
4	0.89	0.74	10.07	11.31	13.61
8	1.24	0.95	15.63	12.60	16.45
16	1.76	1.38	25.52	14.50	18.49
32	3.33	2.15	47.35	14.22	22.02

As conclusion, this card provides great read performance. A single card provides 5-8x better throughput and 10-14x better response time. Striping helps to increase throughput in 8-10x and response time in 10-22x.

While there are questions about write performance (see my previous post), I think this card is very suitable for read-intensive tasks, where you can expect significant improvements.

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