Anvil's Storage Utilities:
Anvil's Storage Utilities is another new 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 S3C'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 S3C's performance was hit and miss when tested with Iometer. While the drive was able to read at a respectable 535.4 MB/s, its sequential write speed averaged out at only 183.92 MB/s.
The S3C wasn't one of the faster drives we've tested when it came to random reads and writes. In our tests, the drive was able to read at 102.34 MB/s and write at 169.34 MB/s.
According to Plextor, the 256GB version of the S3C is capable of 90,000 IOPS when reading and 71,000 IOPS when writing 4K blocks. In our tests, the drive reached 26,199 random read IOPS and 43,351 random write IOPS. Increasing the queue depth had little impact on the S3C's random write performance. However, with the queue depth set to 32, the drive was able to reach 76,488 random read IOPS.
