Model | Kingmax SMP35 240 Gigabyte |
Capacity | 240 Gigabyte |
Memory | Asynchronous NAND Flash |
Technology | Micron 2FA18NW289 |
Throughput | up to 550 MB/s reading, up to 520 MB/s writing up to 75'000 IOPS write |
Accesstime (read) | < 0.1 ms |
Acoustics | no noise |
Warranty | 3 Years |
A closer look at the delivery shows that there is 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch adapter bracket, a set of screws, a molex to SATA power cable adapter, a SATA III cable and a manual. There is no disk imaging software included in the bundle.
Models tested | ||
Testenvironment |
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Motherboard | ASUS P8P67 Deluxe B3 | |
Chipset | Intel P67 | 1'333 MHz |
CPU | Intel Core i7 2600k | 3.4 GHz |
Memory | Kingston HyperX 2133 | 4 GByte |
Graphics card | Gigabyte GeForce GTX 285 | |
Storage (system) | Seagate Barracuda | 640 GByte |
Operating systems | Ubuntu - most recent Kernel version Windows 7 64 Bit with caching drives |
|
Filesystem | XFS |
We think everybody reading this article can imagine the following scenario: You just bought a hard drive which according the specs sheet should transfer 120 MByte/s reading and writing. In the reviews you read about astonishing 110 MByte/s but after you put the drive into you system it feels much slower. The whole story gets even worse when you start a benchmark which does randomread/write of 4 KByte blocks. There you only get two to three MBytes/s.
Because of this we don't want to publish screenshots of standard programs like HD-Tach, HD-Tune, ... we want our tests to be
... sind.
We test with activated caches and NCQ (Native Command Queueing) because they're also activated under daily use. But the data size tested is always at least twice the amount of the memory. In this there will be no intereference.
We noticed that the measuring error is constantly within ±2%. Therefore we mention it only here.
Additionally we evaluate the S.M.A.R.T. data to assess if there are already errors.
The following table give you a brief overview to which points we turn our centre of attention.
Test | Observations |
Sequential Read/Write Tests |
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Random Read/Write Tests |
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iozone3 is a benchmark suit for storage solutions which natively runs under Linux.
Therefore we are testing the throughput with different block sizes using the following commands:
It is important to reproduce scenarios of daily usage. Certain parameters need to be variable during the test to make a statement about the product. In our test the parameters are the different block sizes. It defines the size in KBytes which is written/read on the drive during a transaction.
With this method one can test the reading and writing of either small and big files. In a normal personal computer environment you usually don't find many files smaller than 16 KByte. The relative amount of small files is much bigger on a mail or database server. Therefore tests with small block sizes are of interest for database-based applications.
In bigger RAID arrays the hard disk cache is usually disabled and the RAID-Controller takes over the job of caching. Exactly in such setups hard drives need to be very fast when reading or writing small amounts of data. Sequential throughput isn't interesting in this case.
Announcement: Despite the circumstance that the rating of a product is based on as many objective facts as possible there are factors which can have an influence on a rating after publication. Every autor may perceive data differently over time whereas one possible reason for example is a deeper background knowledge or understanding of certain processes. Certain unforseen market conditions as well as changes have the potential to render a descision made at a certain point in time obsolete.
A closer look at the sequential thoughput rates reveals
that there is solid performance especially at higher block sizes. Regarding sequential reads we se a maximum value of
498 Megabyte per second. Concerning sequential writes the drive tops out at 522
Megabyte per seconds. When it comes to random IOPS we measured almost 58'000 IOPS for
random reads and aobut 23'500 IOPS for random writes. On the box of this drive
you can find that the drive should be able to perform 550 Megabyte per second
when doing sequential reads and 520 Megabyte per second when it does sequential
writes. During our tests we haven't been able to confirm these values. A closer
look at the random IOPS shows the impact on performance of asynchronous NAND
flash. With synchronous NAND flash you get almost double the random write IOPS
compared to what the SMP35 delivers. Overall the SMP35 isn't a bad drive but the
fact that the competition which also uses SandForce SF-2281 controlers but
synchronous NAND flash is only a tiny bit more expensive. In order to become a
success this drive should be sold quite a bit cheaper than the drives that make
use of the much faster synchronous NAND flash.