OCZ Z-Drive R4 PCIe SSD Performance Preview
As we've noted in our previous SSD coverage, 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 results with IOMeter appear to scale properly with workload, 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. That said, we do think IOMeter is a gauge for relative available bandwidth and response throughput for a given storage solution. In addition there are certain higher-end workloads you can invoke on a drive with IOMeter, that you really can't with any other benchmark tool available currently.
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In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; our Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and our Database access pattern of 4K transfers, 67% reads (34% writes) and 100% random access.
Under very light workloads, the Z-Drive R4 offers midland performance and doesn't push past Fusion-io's competitive enterprise SLC-based ioDrive. However, turn up the requests and the Z-Drive R4 really screams. Though our more read-intensive 8K Workstation test shows a slightly wider performance spread for the new Z-Drive, overall OCZ's solution offers more than two times the IO throughput versus the far more expensive (on a per GB basis) Fusion-io product under these test conditions.
