Netbook SSD Performance

I have a Dell Mini9. It has a 4GB STEC SSD drive. As SSD's are extremely different then HDDs in the way they operate, I was interested in its general performance under certain conditions.

My biggest interest is the difference between the stock Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron and the New Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. One of the primary differences between the two is that Jaunty supports EXT4 while Hardy supports EXT3. The kernel for Hardy is 2.6.24-SS LPIA, the kernel for Jaunty is 2.6.28-11 i386.

Now I know this is not a scientific test, as there are a bunch of variables that I have not controlled for, I.E.; kernel, kernel architecture, fs, and so on. I did use the noatime option on both ext3 and ext4.

All tests were performed with iometer. They were performed on /dev/sda1 as I didn't want to write directly to /dev/sda directly, as this would blow away the underlying OS. I may do that in the future.

The first set of tests is read performance, both random and sequential. I did this with 2 different transaction sizes, 4KB and 2MB. As the SSD block size is 4KB this is the smallest effective transaction possible. The 2MB size I thought was big enough to give an idea of larger transactions.

Both IO/s and MB/s are ascertained. The IO/s tells us how quickly a transaction can be accomplished. If you have multiple processes accessing different data simultaneously, the more IO/s you have the better. The MB/s is obviously how much data through-put that transaction provides.

Here are the results:

As you can see, Jaunty and EXT4 excel at every test.

Below are the write tests. To do the write test, the drive was aged. If you dont know why aging a SSD drive is important check out this article by anandtech.

Again, Jaunty and EXT4 excels. You can also see that the write through-put is very low. .03 MB/s. This is a result of the aging of the SSD. I will look at a fresh SSD's write performance soon.