ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO Disk Benchmark program is free, and offers a comprehensive set of test variables to work with. In terms of disk performance, it measures interface transfer rates at various intervals for a user-specified length and then reports read and write speeds for these spot-tests. There are some minor improvements made to the 2.34 version of the program, but the benchmark is still limited to non-linear samples up to 256MB. ATTO Disk Benchmark requires that an active partition be set on the drive being tested.

While the bandwidth results are not realistic for determining the maximum drive speeds, ATTO Disk Benchmark is still a good tool for illustrating bandwidth using various file size chunks. Please consider the results displayed by this benchmark to be basic bandwidth performance indicators.

Our basic I/O bandwidth tests begin with the Seagate Barracuda XT SATA 6Gb/s Hard Drive connected to the integrated Intel ICH10R Southbridge chip, as the ATTO Disk Benchmark tools performs file transfers ranging from 0.5 KB to 8192 KB. The ST32000641AS model reveals a 148 MBps read plateau starting from roughly 32-8192 KB file chunks, while the 146 MBps write performance plateaus from 32-8192 KB. The dip in read performance appeared in every test, but moved from one chunk size to another.

Drive Hardware Tested

• Corsair X256 256GB SATA SSD CMFSSD-256D1 (Firmware version 1.0)
• Intel X25-E Extreme SATA-II SLC SSD SSDSA2SH032G1GN
• Kingston SSDNow V+ Series 64GB SATA-II MLC SSD SNV225-S2/64GB
• Mtron MOBI 3500 64GB 3.5" SATA SSD MSD-SATA3535-064
• OCZ Agility 120GB SATA-II MLC SSD OCZSSD2-1AGT120G
• OCZ Vertex Turbo 120GB SATA SSD OCZSSD2-1VTXT120G (Firmware version 1.0)
• OCZ Agility-EX 64GB SATA SLC OCZSSD2-1AGTEX60G (Firmware version 1.31)
• Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB ST32000641AS 7200 RPM SATA Hard Disk Drive (64MB Cache Buffer)
• Western Digital VelociRaptor 150GB WD1500HLFS 10,000 RPM SATA Hard Disk Drive (16MB Cache Buffer)
• Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB WD3000HLFS 10,000 RPM SATA Hard Disk Drive (16MB Cache Buffer)

In our next section, Benchmark Reviews compares random access IOPS performance among high-end storage devices using HD Tune Pro...

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