Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme 256GB Solid State Drive Review

IOMeter

IOMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It is used as a benchmark and troubleshooting tool and is easily configured to replicate the behaviour of many popular applications. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is IOPS.

IOMeter allows the configuration of disk parameters such as the ‘Maximum Disk Size’, ‘Starting Disk Sector’ and ‘# of Outstanding I/Os’. This allows a user to configure a test file upon which the ‘Access Specifications’ configure the I/O types to the file. Configurable items within the Access Specifications are:

• Transfer Request Size
• Percent Random/Sequential distribution.
• Percent Read/Write Distribution
• Aligned I/O’s.
• Reply Size
• TCP/IP status
• Burstiness.

The M5 Pro Xtreme is rated for sequential read and write IOPs of up to 100k and 86k respectively and whilst this is almost the case on the write front with the IOPs peaking at just under 84k, the read performance is a little lower than expected. I do note that in this 15 minute test, the IOPs did rise at a steady rate from a starting point of around 40k, so after a longer period, there is the potential for this drive to run closer to the 100k sequential read as rated.