Intel X-25M G2 SSD

17 Oct 2009

I’ve since updated some of this with a controller based RAID0 of the intel drives, as well as a RAID1 of Western Digital RE3 1TB drives.

At work we’re upgrading a linux server for a specific project. We’re replacing it’s pair of 150GB Western Digital Raptors in RAID1 with 2x 1TB in RAID1 and **2 Intel X-25M G2 **Solid State Disks in RAID0. This software has always had issues with slow random seeks. We tried using 32GB flash drives for a similar problem, but even top of the line CF disks just weren’t fast enough.

The drives arrived today, and they look amazing. I did three fairly simple performance tests. The server has 2 Intel X5355 Xeon CPUs, for 8 cores at 2.66GHz and 32GB of RAM. /dev/sda is a 250GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10. /dev/sdb is the pair of 150GB VelociRaptors in a RAID1. /dev/sdc is the Intel X25M. I haven’t installed the second Intel yet. I also haven’t tweaked the settings at all, so I’m not positive NCQ and AHCI are enabled for the best performance. It’s also an older kernel, 2.6.20 on an older ubuntu. I’m using ext3, while I understand ext4 will provide some performance increases.

I ran three different benchmarks on the drives. First was a basic hdparm -tT to compare raw disk reads. The SSD was 3 times faster than the Raptor. Second was the postmark utility, which is supposed to be representative of a mail server workload. I’m slightly skeptical, but it appears the SSD was 3-4 times faster. Finally I ran bonnie++, with 63GB files. I only did it on the Raptor and SSD due to time, but the SSD was 2.2-4x faster for transfer speeds. The crazy part is bonnie++ says the SSD could do 47 times more seeks per second than the raptor. I fully admit I’m not familiar with bonnie or postmark, so if anyone has suggestions on other settings to use, please let me know.

Graph illustrating transfer rates for SSD vs HDs

Seeks. The RAID was off the carts.

Below are the raw results and commands I used to generate the info, in case anyone is curious.

hdparm results

chris@gore:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc
/dev/sda: #Maxtor 250GB
Timing cached reads:   6020 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3011.94 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  202 MB in  3.00 seconds =  67.30 MB/sec

/dev/sdb: #Raptor RAID1
Timing cached reads:   6172 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3087.55 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  244 MB in  3.02 seconds =  80.88 MB/sec

/dev/sdc: #Intel X25M
Timing cached reads:   6164 MB in  2.00 seconds = 3083.54 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  730 MB in  3.00 seconds = 243.09 MB/sec

Postmark

chris@gore:~$ cat postmark.conf
set read 4096
set write 4096
set transactions 10000
set size 500 500000
set number 5000

#sda crappy SATA
chris@gore:/mnt/alt/$ postmark ~/postmark.conf
Time:   118 seconds total
        97 seconds of transactions (103 per second)
Files:  9950 created (84 per second)
                Creation alone: 5000 files (833 per second)
                Mixed with transactions: 4950 files (51 per second)
        5026 read (51 per second)
        4974 appended (51 per second)
        9950 deleted (84 per second)
                Deletion alone: 4900 files (326 per second)
                Mixed with transactions: 5050 files (52 per second)
Data:   1396.61 megabytes read (11.84 megabytes per second)
        2861.03 megabytes written (24.25 megabytes per second)

#sdb raptor RAID1
chris@gore:~$ postmark ~/postmark.conf
Time:   116 seconds total
        102 seconds of transactions (98 per second)
Files:  9950 created (85 per second)
                Creation alone: 5000 files (1000 per second)
                Mixed with transactions: 4950 files (48 per second)
        5026 read (49 per second)
        4974 appended (48 per second)
        9950 deleted (85 per second)
                Deletion alone: 4900 files (544 per second)
                Mixed with transactions: 5050 files (49 per second)
Data:   1396.61 megabytes read (12.04 megabytes per second)
        2861.03 megabytes written (24.66 megabytes per second)

#sdc SSD
chris@gore:/mnt/ssda/huge$ postmark ~/postmark.conf
Time:   32 seconds total
        28 seconds of transactions (357 per second)
Files:  9950 created (310 per second)
                Creation alone: 5000 files (1666 per second)
                Mixed with transactions: 4950 files (176 per second)
        5026 read (179 per second)
        4974 appended (177 per second)
        9950 deleted (310 per second)
                Deletion alone: 4900 files (4900 per second)
                Mixed with transactions: 5050 files (180 per second)
Data:   1396.61 megabytes read (43.64 megabytes per second)
        2861.03 megabytes written (89.41 megabytes per second)

#bonnie++ -b

Raptor RAID1,63G,40986,55,36001,10,26842,4,60763,71,63846,5,102.9,0,16,79,0,+++++,+++,79,0,80,0,+++++,+++,79,0
Single X25-M,63G,65092,86,79769,22,60024,10,86899,98,256937,21,4884.9,10,16,2069,5,+++++,+++,2147,4,2362,5,+++++,+++,2193,4
Western Digital 1TB RE3 RAID1,63G,51726,64,49560,8,46897,8,48455,71,101728,9,381.6,0,16,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++
2x X25-M RAID0,63G,84487,99,179178,26,96480,16,58096,85,414760,38,+++++,+++,16,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++