Performance analysis of commodity and enterprise class flash devices

Five different flash-based storage devices were evaluated, two commodity SATA attached MLC ones and three enterprise PCIe attached SLC ones. Specifically, their peak bandwidth and IOPS capabilities were measured. The results show that the PCI attached devices have a significant performance advantage over the SATA ones, by a factor of between four and six in read and write bandwidth respectively, and by a factor of eight for random-read and a factor of 80 for random-write IOPS. The performance degradation that occurred when the drives were already partially filled with data was recorded. These measurements show that significant bandwidth degradation occurred for all the devices, whereas only one of the PCIe and one of the SATA drives showed any IOPS performance degradation. Across these tests no single device consistently out performs the others, therefore these results indicate that there is no one size fits all flash solution currently on the market and that devices should be evaluated carefully with I/O usage patterns as close as possible to the ones they are expected to encounter in a production environment.