Micron M500DC Enterprise Class SSD Review
Test Setup, IOMeter 1.1 RC
Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available as of press time and AHCI (or RAID) mode was enabled. The SSDs were secure erased prior to testing, and left blank without partitions for some tests, while others required them to be partitioned and formatted, as is the case with our ATTO, PCMark 7, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test.
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Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Storage -
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Hardware Used: Intel Core i7-4770K Gigabyte Z87X-UD7 TH (Z87 Chipset, AHCI Enabled) Intel HD 4400 8GB G.SKILL DDR3-1600 Integrated on board Corsair Force GT (OS Drive) Intel SSD DC3500 (480GB) Intel SSD DC3700 (200GB) Micron p400m (200GB) SanDisk CloudSpeed 1000 E (800GB) Micron M500DC (480GB, 800GB) |
OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Relevant Software: Windows 8.1 Enterprise x64 Intel 9.4.0.1027, iRST 12.8.0.1016 DirectX 11 Intel HD 10.18.10.33 Benchmarks Used: IOMeter 1.1.0 RC HD Tune v5.50 ATTO v2.47 AS SSD CrystalDiskMark v3.0.3 x64 PCMark 7 SiSoftware Sandra 2014 |
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As we've noted in previous SSD articles, though IOMeter is clearly a well-respected industry standard drive benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it for testing SSDs. The fact of the matter is, though our actual results with IOMeter appear to scale properly, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real-world performance for the average end user. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative available throughput within a given storage solution. In addition there are certain higher-end workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter, that you can't with most other storage benchmark tools available currently.
In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; our custom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (34% writes) and 100% random access.
The new Micron M500DC series drives put up some excellent numbers in our IOMeter tests. With both access patterns, across every queue depth, both drives performed at, or near, the top of the charts.
In terms of bandwidth, both Micron M500DC series drives also did very well, leading the pack by a significant margin.
