Iometer IOPS Performance

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. Iometer does for a computer’s I/O subsystem what a dynamometer does for an engine: it measures performance under a controlled load. Iometer was originally developed by the Intel Corporation and formerly known as “Galileo”. Intel has discontinued work on Iometer, and has gifted it to the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). There is currently a new version of Iometer in beta form, which adds several new test dimensions for SSDs.

Iometer is both a workload generator (that is, it performs I/O operations in order to stress the system) and a measurement tool (that is, it examines and records the performance of its I/O operations and their impact on the system). It can be configured to emulate the disk or network I/O load of any program or benchmark, or can be used to generate entirely synthetic I/O loads. It can generate and measure loads on single or multiple (networked) systems.

For 4K Aligned 4KB Random Read testing, the Samsung 840 Pro once again leads the pack. The OCZ Vertex 4 comes pretty close, but the real surprise to me in this test was the Corsair Force LS.

The 4K Aligned 4KB Random Write tests give us our first test where the Samsung 840 Pro doesn’t top the chart. The OCZ Vertex 4 beats out the 840 Pro by a narrow margin. That is, of course, before we enabled RAPID mode. Nothing holds a candle to the 840 Pro with RAPID mode enabled.

Next up here we have the Sequential Read results and the Samsung 840 Pro once again takes second chair, this time to the Corsair Force LS.

The sequential write tests, like the random write test, goes to the OCZ Vertex 4. That is, of course, unless you enable RAPID mode.

In our next section, we test linear read and write bandwidth performance and compare its speed against several other top storage products using EVEREST Disk Benchmark. Benchmark Reviews feels that linear tests are excellent for rating SSDs, however HDDs are put at a disadvantage with these tests whenever capacity is high.