Silverstone SST-EP02 & SST-MS07 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.

Whilst the sequential read and write speeds maintain a reasonable level of performance through the EP02, the IOPs performance on the SSD takes a major hit; dropping to between 10 & 20% of that on a native SATA connection. With a hard drive, the IOPs performance is not really a major factor as spinning platters are not able to deliver high levels of IOPs even on a native connection.