Sandisk X210 256GB Business Class 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.

Pre-conditioned Drive

Conditioned Drive

Looking at the results above between the new, unused drive and then the conditioned unit after 5TB of data throughput, there is quite a significant rise in the IOPs performance as promised by Sandisk. On the read front, we see close to a 90% gain in IOPs to a shade under 80k, whilst on the write IOPs a slightly lower gain of around 60% is seen.

Looking at the other drives in our chart, we can see how far up the IOPs performance pushes this drive in the rankings and even though this drive is not able to deliver quite as much as the Extreme II, we must come back round once again to the optimisation of the firmware for reliability that must take priority here.