About SSD Testing Methods of MyCE

Computer Hardware SSDs, Hard Drives and NAS
#1

Hello dear friends,

This is my very first post here.

Hope we all to enjoy nice time on this qualified forum.

My first question comes to Dee and JReynolds:

I am new to use the IOMeter software. And when I check your SSD reviews, on IOMeter page, you use these words to explain that how you are making the tests by:

‘’ … I use a 4KB file size, as it is believed that Windows will create and modify many of this size of file … IOMeter 4K random write test with fully random data … IOMeter 4K random read test … ‘’

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So, where to select these parameters and queue depths on IOMeter and decide running tests for 3 minutes ?

Thank you,

Best regards.

#2

Hi and welcome to the forum.

IOMeter is very versatile but also has a steep leaning curve.
Once you get used to it, you’ll find its quite easy.

To give you some pointers, here is how to setup 4K random write.
From the ‘access specifications’ page, press the ‘new option’, and set it up as in picture 1.

To set the test time, select the ‘test setup’ page, and take a look at picture 2.

From the ‘disk targets’ page you select the drive you want to test, the test file size (maximum disk size). In the example in picture 3, this will create a test file of approximately 22GB.
Set the starting sector to 1024
#number of outstanding I/O’s is your queue depth. for consumer grade SSDs select a value of between 1 - 32.
See picture 3 as an example.

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#3

Thank you Dee,

it is my pleasure to be here.

I will able to check the pictures after posting this, this will be my second message so I can see the pics :slight_smile:

#4

Dear Dee,

Thank you very much for these valuable informations, it helpmed me lot.

I am okay with 4K Random tests.

But when I run sequential tests, especially 512KB sequential read QD1, I always get too low scores. In your Vector 150 review you got 520MB/s, but I get only 17MB/s around.

Am I doing something wrong ?

1- I choosed %100 Sequential - Read - QD1

2- Transfer Request Size is 512B

3- Align I/Os on

#5

You have Transfer Request Size set to 512B (512 Bytes)
It needs to be set to 512KB (512 kilobytes)

#6

Ohh, my mistake.

Thank you Dee,

I would like to ask one more question, if it does not bother you ?

How to understand the Queue Depths, what is the difference between 1 to 32 ?

I know 4K is the key about OS and applications. But the other QDs, I do not which users groups needs these, not the consumers maybe.

#7

Queue depth is very complicated, and you need some specialist software or hardware to gain access to how commands are being queued by the operating system and applications.

If you open task manager you will notice that a typical system has hundreds of threads running. Most of those will only ever reside in system RAM, but some of those threads will require disk access.

An AHCI SATA controller supports native command queuing (NCQ). That simply means that several disk access commands can be queued and all sent at once. An HDD or SSD can only act on one command at a time. But if that SSD also supports NCQ then it can receive several access commands at the same time, rather than having to wait on each access command being sent, before it can then act on the next command. By doing this a lot of time can be saved, and therefore increased performance.

Queue depth is simply the amount of commands that can serviced at once. For a typical PC user, this will be quite low, in the region of a queue depth of between 1 and 3. However, most manufacturers claim that their SSD can handle upto a queue depth of 32, so we test at upto a queue depth of 32.