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.


Random write speed has been the bane of many recent SSDs, but happily the Falcon with it's Indilinx drive controller doesn't suffer from any of the stuttering issues that troubled previous generations of drives. Random Write speed is an excellent 9.26MB/s (again, the random nature of our benchmark means there's a +/-10% margin of error), nine times as fast as Samsung's Spinpoint F1 1TB and twice as fast as the Corsair P256. It is important to remember though that these numbers are based on a purely synthetic benchmark, and have little real world impact.


poor random write latencies is the culprit behind the stuttering issue that has caused the poor random write performance of previous generations of SSDs and the Falcon, just like the Vertex avoids it completely. Average write latencies of 1.3ms mean you'll get smooth stutter free performance.


Maximum write latencies are similarly low, superior to both the Corsair P256 and the Intel X25-M using our Iometer file pattern, making the Falcon a stutter free, random write champ.