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 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 received further attention in the latest firmware and extends Indilinx's lead in this department further, with the Torqx achieving an impressive 31.97MB/s in Iometer's synthetic tests. The Indilinx is notably better than the more expensive Samsung and Intel drives in this test as well.



Random read latencies are predictably tiny, with an average of 0.37ms and a maximum of 1.39ms in line with what we've come to expect from the excellent Indilinx drive controller.