AnandTech Storage Bench 2011

Back in 2011 (which seems like so long ago now!), we introduced our AnandTech Storage Bench, a suite of benchmarks that took traces of real OS/application usage and played them back in a repeatable manner. The MOASB, officially called AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload, mainly focuses on peak IO performance and basic garbage collection routines. There is a lot of downloading and application installing that happens during the course of this test. Our thinking was that it's during application installs, file copies, downloading and multitasking with all of this that you can really notice performance differences between drives. The full description of the Heavy test can be found here, while the Light workload details are here.

In our Heavy workload trace, the story changes. Now the 256GB M550 is faster than the 256GB MX100 but the 512GB MX100 still leads the Crucial pack. I'm thinking that the 256GB M550 is more optimized for non-steady-state operation as that's more common for client workloads, which would explain why it performs poorly in the 2013 bench but is better in the 2011 Heavy test. What's surprising is that the 256GB MX100 is much faster than the 256GB SP920 despite that fact that the only difference between them should be the NAND lithography. Maybe Micron/Crucial didn't give ADATA the highest performing firmware after all.

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