Benchmarks: Atto Disk Benchmark

The Atto Disk Benchmark is often used by manufacturers to record read/write times then used to market their SSD products. For example OCZ claims a read speed of up to 280MB/s for the Agility 2 40GB and we achieved 271MB/s on our test system which we feel is close enough. Kingston on the other hand claimed 200MB/s for the SNV425-S2 64GB though for us the drive peaked at 257MB/s. Looking at the data all drives performed as claimed though as many of you know figures provided by Atto are only a small piece of the pie which is why we include so many other tests.

The peak write bandwidth numbers for the OCZ Agility 2 and Vertex 2 40GB SSDs are impressive with both drives topping out at 268MB/s. The next fastest drives were the Seagate Momentus XT 500GB and Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB with both cracking the 100MB/s mark. However, while the 32K and 128K performance of the hard drives was impressive they suffered when measuring 1K, 2K and even 8K performance.

Perhaps the most consistent drives in this test other than the OCZ Agility 2 and Vertex 2 40GB SSDs were the Onyx 32/64GB drives. The performance of the Intel X25-V 40GB was also very consistent but it was low with a throughput of around 40MB/s.