SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB SSD Review

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.

Looking at the read IOPs, SanDisk rate the drive at 82k, however repeated testing does show that the real world levels are down a little, however 72k on its own is still very acceptable. For the vast majority of users, the IOPs is not something that will be noticed, but for those that do video editing for example this can play a major role in encoding times.

The write IOPs similarly are a little down on the rated specifications, however they are very consistent and even after a half hour continuous test they remained at a similar level of around 25k.