I did a little benchmarking to compare our lightning fast SATA VPS host machines vs our even faster SSD VPS host machines.  And guess what, SSD is faster (shocking!) but with an interesting wrinkle…

This benchmark test compared the disk speeds of our 8 drive RAID-10 SATA disk arrays (running 3ware MegaRaid cards) vs our new 4 drive RAID-10 SSD disk arrays (also running MegaRaid cards) using the Bonnie++ disk IO speed test.   Keep in mind that 8 drive SATA hardware arrays running RAID 10 is wicked fast, but I was curious to know just how much faster 4 drive RAID 10 SSD might be.  Here are the results after writing, re-writing, reading, and seek tests using 220GB’s of data on both machines:

Initial data writes: 4.91x faster on SSD (Sequential Output - Block K/sec)
Data re-writes: 8x faster on SSD (Sequential Output - Rewrite K/sec)

Random data reads: Infinity faster on SSD (Random Seeks /sec)
Read file block: 9x faster on SSD (Sequential Input K/sec)

The SSD machine is roughly 8-9 times faster with data reads – not surprising – and with initial data seeks the SSD machine is so fast that Bonnie++ couldn’t measure the speed.

And what is very surprising – to me at least – was that the SSD machine was also almost 5 times faster with data writes and 8 times faster with data re-writes.  Who knew?

So SSD, at least in our hardware RAID setups, is faster all around, not just with reads.

Good to know, right?

Next up ->  SSD vs SATA price per GB.

~ Oban