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Testing the Samsung MU-PA500B 500GB SSD
Solid State
Performance Roundup
Traditionally, the first look at a drive's block performance is taken with the omnipresent dd
(1) tool [8]. Aside from its ubiquity, the ability to benchmark an unpartitioned drive might come in handy. This is a sequential write benchmark, so never write to the drive's device file (e.g., sdb
) directly unless you actually intend to erase the partition (Figure 3). hdparm
[9] also includes a built-in benchmark that is aware of caching and buffering [10]. hdparm
is also a powerful resource to configure internal drives, but although this is not possible over USB, it can be used to turn disk caching on or off (-W
) over a SATA bus.
Finally, I'll complete the quick inspection by checking the drive's I/O latency with ioping
[11]. Just like its network namesake, ioping
continues to read from a defined filesystem path until interrupted, reporting its results at the end (Listing 3). You can expect an average 200ms of latency on small reads from this remarkable external device.
Listing 3
ioping
federico@cybertron:~$ sudo ioping /media/federico/Samsung_T5/ 4 KiB <<< /media/federico/Samsung_T5/ (fuseblk /dev/sdb1): request=1 time=94.8 us (warmup) 4 KiB <<< /media/federico/Samsung_T5/ (fuseblk /dev/sdb1): request=2 time=202.2 us 4 KiB <<< /media/federico/Samsung_T5/ (fuseblk /dev/sdb1): request=3 time=200.4 us 4 KiB <<< /media/federico/Samsung_T5/ (fuseblk /dev/sdb1): request=4 time=221.4 us ^C --- /media/federico/Samsung_T5/ (fuseblk /dev/sdb1) ioping statistics --- 3 requests completed in 623.9 us, 12 KiB read, 4.81 k iops, 18.8 MiB/s generated 4 requests in 3.35 s, 16 KiB, 1 iops, 4.77 KiB/s min/avg/max/mdev = 200.4 us / 208.0 us / 221.4 us / 9.51 us
Infos
- Jerry Pournelle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle
- MU-PA500B: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B073GZBT36/
- mount(8) man page: https://linux.die.net/man/8/mount
- fstab(5) man page: https://linux.die.net/man/5/fstab
- "How to Mount and Unmount Filesystem/Partition in Linux" by Balakrishnan Mariyappan: https://www.thegeekstuff.com/2013/01/mount-umount-examples/
- fdisk(8) man page: https://linux.die.net/man/8/fdisk
- "Aligning filesystem partitions" by Federico Lucifredi, ADMIN , issue 19, 2014, pg. 96, http://www.admin-magazine.com/Archive/2014/19/Aligning-filesystem-partitions
- dd(1) man page: https://linux.die.net/man/1/dd
- hdparm(1) man page: https://linux.die.net/man/8/hdparm
- "Tuning your filesystem" by Federico Lucifredi, ADMIN , issue 7, 2012, pg. 81, http://www.admin-magazine.com/Articles/Tuning-Your-Filesystem-s-Cache
- ioping: https://github.com/koct9i/ioping/
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