Crucial M550 512GB Solid State Drive Review

IOMeter

IOMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It is used as a benchmark and troubleshooting tool and is easily configured to replicate the behaviour of many popular applications. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is IOPS.

IOMeter allows the configuration of disk parameters such as the ‘Maximum Disk Size’, ‘Starting Disk Sector’ and ‘# of Outstanding I/Os’. This allows a user to configure a test file upon which the ‘Access Specifications’ configure the I/O types to the file. Configurable items within the Access Specifications are:

• Transfer Request Size
• Percent Random/Sequential distribution.
• Percent Read/Write Distribution
• Aligned I/O’s.
• Reply Size
• TCP/IP status
• Burstiness.

Unconditioned Read / Write

Conditioned Read / Write

IOPs performance over time in a large number of cases is expected to grow over time and this the case as seen when I looked at the X210 SSD not too long ago. For the M550, the story is a little different as we see a slight drop in performance instead, although some fortune can be taken that the drop is not as detrimental to system performance as sequential read and write speeds are.

Drive Comparison

For the purpose of drive comparison I use the performance figures from both unconditioned and conditioned tests with 0% data fill.

Whilst we have seen the sequential read and write performance take a considerable hit as the drive get more worn, the IOPs performance stays rather strong with the conditioned figures well above that of a HyperX 3K that is fresh out of the box.