Base Product Specifications

The five major measurements of base performance of any Solid State Storage solution are latency, random read/write and sequential read/write speed. These are the most common measurements that are posted by manufacturers to advertise storage performance. We will cover the latency and sequential read and write on this page and random performance on the following page. We begin with a measurement of the latency of the device. The industry standard for measurement of latency is 4K Random Access at a Queue Depth (QD) of one.

The Dual 910s access time is virtually identical to the 800GB single device measurements, causing them to actually be hidden underneath the 800GB results. The Server 2008 R2 LSI drivers handle all 8 volumes seamlessly even with two PCIe SSDs connected, so there is virtually no impact to base latency for either device.

The 128K sequential read speeds reflect the maximum sequential throughput of the SSD using a realistic file size that will actually be encountered in an enterprise scenario. With two 910s aggregating their speeds they manage to push 3,928MB/s, slightly under 4GB/s.

The 800GB scores at 1956MB/s, barely below the advertised 2.0GB/s. We can observe similar results with the 400GB, coming in at 973MB/s, a tad below the rated 1GB/s. Once again, as with the 400 and 800GB single SSD results, we will observe nearly perfect scaling over the course of the benchmarks. The LSISAS2008 PCIe bridge scales exceptionally well with each of the four controllers on each SSD, so the dual 910 results are at expected levels in almost all benchmarks.

The two 910s reach 1820MB/s in sequential write speed. This is not perfect scaling with the 800GB results, which is due to running the dual tests at the default power setting. The 800GB tests were conducted at the maximum performance setting. These results are roughly 180MB/s below the expected value for the two SSDs together in the default performance mode.

The 128K Sequential Write speeds of the 800GB, in maximum performance mode, top out at 1480MB/s, right below the rated 1.5GB/s using the Maximum Performance mode. The default power mode hits 1GB/s with sequential write access. The 400GB reaches 745MB/s, right at the rated spec of .75GB/s.