Anvil's Storage Utilities:
Anvil's Storage Utilities is another benchmark designed with SSDs in mind. The standard storage benchmark measures a drive's performance by testing its transfer speeds, access times and IOPS.
Iometer:
Lastly, I ran a series of tests using Iometer. This tool can be configured to benchmark a number of things. In this case, I used it to measure the M8Se's read and write speeds and the number of operations per second. The tests were run using random bytes and a queue depth of 3.
The M8Se's performance was hit and miss when tested with Iometer. While the drive was able to read at a respectable 2310.81 MB/s, its sequential write speed averaged out at only 472.68 MB/s.
While faster than the SATA SSDs, the M8Se lagged behind the other PCIe SSDs when doing random reads and writes. In our tests, the drive was able to read at 215.13 MB/s and write at 409.15 MB/s.
According to Plextor, the 512GB M8Se is capable of up to 210,000 IOPS when reading and 175,000 IOPS when writing 4K blocks. In our tests, the drive reached 55,072 random read IOPS and 104,743 random write IOPS. As with most drives, the M8Se performed better at higher queue depths. With the queue depth set to 32, it reached 243,207 random read IOPS and 109,328 random write IOPS.
