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 M9Pe'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 M9Pe's performance was hit and miss when tested with Iometer. While the drive was able to read at an impressive 2,624.58 MB/s, its sequential write speed averaged out at only 307.16 MB/s.
While faster than many of the SATA SSDs, the M9Pe lagged behind the other PCIe SSDs when doing random reads and writes. In our tests, the drive was able to read at 211.88 MB/s and write at 272.03 MB/s.
According to Plextor, the 256GB M9Pe is capable of up to 180,000 IOPS when reading and 160,000 IOPS when writing 4K blocks. In our tests, the drive reached 54,240 random read IOPS and 69,640 random write IOPS. Increasing the queue depth had little impact on the M9Pe's random write performance. However, with the queue depth set to 32, the drive was able to reach 109,411 random read IOPS.
