Kingston HyperX Fury 240GB 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

Between the read and write sides of the drive controller there is a notable difference in IOPs performance with the write exceeding that of the write by a wide margin. This said though we can see that the IOPs are not just stable, they are very consistent with barely any fluctuation as the drive wears and fills with data.

Drive Comparison

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

Where the write performance of the Fury is its Achilles heel in our other benchmark tests, within Iometer it’s the read that lets the drive down. If we were to plot the chart based on write IOPs, the Fury would actually be one of the better drives that we’ve seen to date – it’s just a shame that the write speeds can’t support the IOPs.