Iometer Results

Website: Iometer

Iometer is a powerful open source synthetic benchmarking tool, able to simulate the effects of a wide variety of software loads and circumstances on either individual hard disk drives and complete drive arrays. In the past we've chosen not to include it due to bit-tech's traditional preference towards real world benchmarks. However, to correctly check for drive stutter caused by extremely high random write latencies there aren't a great deal of options, so we've finally decided to include Iometer in our hard disk testing suite.

For our Iometer testing we used a 4GB portion of the drive and subjected it to random read or write commands or both, depending on the test, of 4KB, with three outstanding I/Os to simulate high level multi-tasking. We ran this each test for two minutes, repeating three times to ensure we recorded an accurate result.

As the differences in read and write latencies and speeds can be so pronounced, we've also included tables of information where appropriate, to help make understanding the random read/write performance differences between different SSDs and conventional hard disk drives easier.


Combined random read write speeds aren't necessarily an average of the random write and random read speeds as the heavy combined load stressing the drive controller to the limit. Having placed behind the OCZ Vertex in both random read and write speed though it's unsurprising to find that the Corsair P256, while many times faster than a conventional hard disk under this heavy synthetic load, still falls short of the OCZ and X25-M's random read/write speed.


Average combined read/write latencies are excellent though, and are many times faster than even the quickest hard disk drive, although are still a little slower than the OCZ Vertex or X25-M. However, when dealing with such fractional amounts of time the real world performance difference is negligible.


The Corsair P256 has the lowest maximum latencies of any drive we've tested when tasked with a heavy combined random read/write workload, bettering every other SSD and hard disk drive and ensuring stutter free performance regardless of the work load.