Orcea David, 123RF
TKperf – Customized performance testing for SSDs and HDDs
Stopwatch
Solid State Drives (SSDs) have grown beyond their status as a niche product and now increasingly compete with traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) as an attractive option for server systems in terms of capacity and price. Whether SSDs really do boost performance depends on the particular application, because the requirements placed on the storage systems can differ fundamentally. Users must first decide on SSDs, HDDs, or a combination of the two technologies. Once you've decided which medium to use, you still need to choose an appropriate model.
Test for Yourself
To begin, you will want to make sure that the speed of the selected hardware meets your current and future performance requirements. Meaningful and transparent performance tests considerably facilitate your search for the right SSD or HDD. From the perspective of the end user, the more information a test delivers, the more valuable it is. Often the manufacturer's performance specifications are not authoritative, because neither the software used nor the test method is specified.
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has released the "Solid State Storage Performance Test Specification," a document that provides a specific test description for SSDs in the enterprise space [1]. In its tests, the specification specifically targets the unique properties of SSDs and describes the approach to achieving accurate and reproducible results. TKperf, an open source tool developed by Thomas-Krenn.AG, implements this specification and prepares the results in a test report [2]. In addition to testing for SSDs, some initial basic tests for hard disks are also available; they will be expanded in future versions of TKperf.
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