We evaluated two PCIe attached SSD devices manufactured by Texas Memory Systems and Virident in terms of I/O bandwidth and IOPs. One of them is the “RamSan-70 Gorilla” card designed by Texas Memory Systems. The other device is the Virident FlashMax, formerly called TachIOn. Both devices are based on SLC technology, provide similar usable storage capacity and are connected via PCIe Gen2 x8 to a dual-socket node. Fio was used as benchmark tool.
The performance characteristics were collected with various block size and different number of threads using the cards as raw devices and with xfs file system. Also degradation tests with filled cards have been carried out. We saw especially for the Virident card a tremendous improvement in the overall performance, now both devices provide peak performance numbers comparable to the specifications provided in the vendor datasheets. The TMS device achieved a peak random read bandwidth of 2.35 GB/s and a random write performance of 1.6 GB/s.
The full report is available on the CSCS website.
http://www.cscs.ch/newsroom/publications/technical_documents/index.html
Tags: Flash Storage, SLC