SSS device performance benchmarking Part 2 IOPS
SSS device performance benchmarking Part 2 IOPS
Introduction to SSS device performance benchmarking
The performance of the Solid State Storage (SSS) device depends critically on:
- Write History and Pre-conditioning: The state of the device prior to the test
- Workload Pattern: Pattern of the I/O (R/W mix, block size, access, etc.)
- Data Pattern: The actual bits in the data payload written to the device
The importance of the SSS device performance measurement is shown in Figure 1. A typical SSS device, taken Fresh-Out-of-the-Box (FOB), and exposed to a workload,typically experiences a brief period of elevated performance, followed by a transition to Steady State performance.
Figure1 SSS device performance measurement
(Reference: SNIA Solid State Storage (SSS) Performance Test Specification (PTS) Version 2.0.2)
What are the important SSS device Performance Metrics?
SSS device performance is most often described in terms of three basic metrics:
Input Output Operations per Second (IOPS), Throughput (usually expressed in Megabytes per second or MB/s) and Response Time (or Latency
and typically expressed in milliseconds or microseconds).
- IOPS refers to the IO operation transfer rate of the device or the number of transactions that can occur in a given unit of time (in this case
seconds). The IO transaction rate is measured in IOPS. - Throughput – abbreviated as “TP” and often expressed as Bandwidth – refers to the rate of data transferor, in this case, the amount of data
that is transferring to or from the SSS device. Throughput is measured in MB/sec (and an oft used metaphor is the “water through a fire hose
or straw” analogy). - Response Time (or Latency) – abbreviated as “LAT” when shortened from Latency – refers to the time it takes for a command generated by
the host to go to the storage device and return, i.e. the round trip time for an IO request. Response time is measured in milliseconds or
microseconds and is often reported as an Average (AVE) or Maximum (MAX) Response Time.
Factors of Influencing SSS device performance
The performance of an SSS device is highly dependent on its prior usage, the pre-test state of the device and test parameters as Figure 2.
Figure 2 Factors of influencing SSS device performance
IOPS performance for Silicon Power Industrial SSD
Silicon Power Industrial follows industrial standard and performance test specifications to verify SSS device performance. However Industrial
application varies from different industries, Silicon Power Industrial team implemented open source utility to evaluate IOPS performance
- OS : Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 64bits
- Flexible I/O Tester suite (https://github.com/axboe/fio) fio-3.24
- Block tracing utilities (http://git.kernel.dk/cgit/blktrace/) blktrace-1.2.0
- Supplement: Testing Shell Script
Architecture of Testing Platform Setup
IIn order to avoid inference of IO throughput we recommend to install target testing SSD to PCIex16 Direct Lane slot to utilize the 100% IO throughput
Figure 3 Architecture of Testing Platform Setup
Comparison of IOPS performance
NAS appliances are usually equipped with NVMe SSD for cache usage.
The higher IOPS performance of NVMe SSD, the better to deliver good performance for NAS appliances.
Supplement : Testing shell script
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