A Look at Enterprise Performance of Intel SSDs

Enterprise Storage Bench - Microsoft SQL UpdateDailyStats

Our next two tests are taken from our own internal infrastructure. We do a lot of statistics tracking at AnandTech - we record traffic data to all articles as well as aggregate traffic for the entire site (including forums) on a daily basis. We also keep track of a running total of traffic for the month. Our first benchmark is a trace of the MS SQL process that does all of the daily and monthly stats processing for the site. We run this process once a day as it puts a fairly high load on our DB server. Then again, we don't have a beefy SSD array in there yet :)

The UpdateDailyStats procedure is mostly reads (3:1 ratio of GB reads to writes) with 431K read operations and 179K write ops. Average queue depth is 4.2 and only 34% of all IOs are issued at a queue depth of 1. The transfer size breakdown is as follows:

Our SQL tests are much more dependent on sequential throughput and thus we really see some impressive gains from moving to a 6Gbps SATA interface. Among the 3Gbps results the Intel SSD 520 is now the top performer, followed once again by the X25-E. To be honest, most of these drives do perform the same as they bump into the limits of 3Gbps SATA.

Once again we see a huge reduction in service time from the Intel SSD 520 running on a 6Gbps interface. Even on a 3Gbps interface the 520 takes the lead while the bulk of the 3Gbps drives cluster together around 14.4ms. Note the tangible difference in performance between the 300GB and 160GB Intel SSD 320. The gap isn't purely because of additional NAND parallelism, the 300GB drive ends up with more effective spare area since the workload size doesn't scale up with drive capacity. What you're looking at here is the impact of spare area on performance.