SSD Throughput, Latency and IOPS Explained – Learning To Run With Flash

As fast as SSDs have found mainstream consumer use, they are unfortunately grouped in the same picture as a hard drive, if only for the fact that they are seen as storage and little more.  Both the size and demography of our readership paints this picture clearly, however, there exists an amazing opportunity to take our readers a step further; an opportunity to show why we might have such passion for what many might consider a very dry area.  In this segment of ‘Learning To Run With Flash’ let’s gain an understanding of the ‘Big 3’ of SSD performance, these being throughput, latency and IOPS.

HDD vs SSD-2

UNDERSTANDING THE BIG 3

The data storage system (SSD, HDD) of any computer is the slowest part, compared to any other major component such as CPU, DRAM memory, or video card. DRAM memory can transfer data at over 20 gigabytes per second (GB/s). CPUs and video card processors can execute their internal instructions billions of times a second. Meanwhile, most storage drives are capable of, at best, processing a few hundred megabytes of data per second (MB/s). Most if not all of the hardware and software running in a PC wait for data from storage devices much longer than any other source. When we see the measure of MB/s, or even GB/s, we are identifying data transfer speeds, or throughput.

Data transfer speed is not the only important performance aspect of a storage device; in fact it is secondary. How long it takes for a data transfer to BEGIN, called latency, is even more important. Moving data slowly from one system to another reduces performance, but the time it takes for the data to begin moving, when no useful work is being done, is a huge factor in the performance of data storage devices.

There is another aspect of data storage device performance that is at least as important as latency. That is how OFTEN the storage device can perform a data transfer. How many Input or Output (IO) operations can be performed by the storage device every second, or IOPS, is a very important measure of its performance, and one that is overlooked too often.  Throughput seems to be the ‘measuring stick’ for the consumer, where latency and IOPS are integral measuring tools when we move to the enterprise, and even data center space.

HDD vs SSD-11

INDUSTRY DEFINITIONS

Our three main performance areas, how often IOs can occur, how long it takes for an IO task to begin, and the speed of the data transfer into or out of the storage device are simply defined in the computer industry as this:

  • How often a storage device can perform IO tasks is measured in Input/Output Operations per Second (IOPS), and varies depending on the type of IO being done. The greater the number of IOPS, the better the performance.
  • How long it takes for a storage device to start an IO task, or latency, is measured in fractions of a second. The smaller the latency time is the better.
  • The speed at which data is transferred out of or into the storage device is measured in bytes per second, normally kilobytes and megabytes per second. We all want more Megabytes per second.

The Big 3 (throughput, latency and IOPS) are what truly indicate the performance capability of a storage device. Let’s expand our understanding of HDD and SSD performance beyond simply MB/s, or throughput, as that is only one part of the performance story. Using a free and very simple to use benchmark called AS SSD, we can do a comparison of a HDD and a SSD while taking a closer look at ‘The Big 3’.

HDD/SSD PERFORMANCE COMPARISON

AS SSD is the bread and butter of SSD synthetic benchmarks as it reads and writes several gigabytes of data to and from the drive. As a bit of a heads up, it took a little over an hour to complete the AS SSD Benchmark on the HDD, while the SSD was done in under five minutes.

Results for the hard drive are shown on the left, while that of the SSD are on the right.

IOPS

as-ssd Hitachi 2TB Z97 Win 8.1 IOPs 6.26.2014as-ssd SanDisk EX II Z97 Win8.1 IOPs 6.23.2014

IOPS tells us how quickly each drive can process IO requests. The first row is the read and write IOPS of a 16MB file, a large file sequential IO. The difference between the HDD and SSD is not huge, the SSD can perform 3.4 times the read IOP requests than the HDD. The large file sequential write IOPS and speeds are similar to the reads, the SSD is about 3.5 times faster than the HDD.

The next row is the small 4K file “random” read and write IOPS. Random means the files are scattered all over the drive, not in neat rows or groups, so take more work to find. Random IO is the most difficult and time consuming type a storage device must deal with. Here we see the HDD can do 176 IOPS, while the SSD gives us 9417 IOPS, or over 53 times more read requests. Since small file, 4K reads are the most common IO done in typical PC usage, this difference reveals how much quicker a SSD can be for a user. The 4K write IOPS show a stunning difference in performance, the HDD 311 IOPS, the SSD 32,933 IOPS, or over 105 times faster. Can performance like this not be noticed by a user?

AS SSD’s “4K-64Thrd” test in the next row is a test of drive’s ability to use the Native Command Queuing (NCQ) feature of AHCI. NCQ simply provides a drive with direct access to up to 32 IO requests in the system’s memory, with only one IO command sent to the drive, instead of 32 IO commands, one for each IO request. That eliminates all the overhead involved processing 32 individual commands. The “4K” is the file size, the IO is random as described above, and the “64Thrd” (64 thread) means that two, 32 NCQ type IO requests are done in the test.

31 comments

  1. blank

    ok, ok…I get it already(lol). I have just purchased my fourth SSD. I do agree that the greatest hindrance to consumption is the HD $/gb vs SSD $/gb. Though those numbers are improving as we speak. Several of my friends (customers) are in the process of transitioning now.

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    The typical consumer will never use the capabilities of SSD. HDD is fast enough, and way cheaper for storage.
    My only reason for adding SSD to my desktop system, is that I use photo editing programs which can have large swap files on a drive. SSD speeds this up greatly.
    Other than the above, it makes little difference, as the PC is on 24/7 anyway, so boot times, while considerably faster, don’t really mean much, and the power consumption is not a consideration, either.

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      I cannot say as I agree at all, having installed and transitioned hundreds to SSD personally. If for start times alone, the consumer wants the increase as much as all others and waiting for that minute and a half startup is now yesterday.

      People who do experience the SSD for the first time seem to have a whole new appreciation for their system. Thanks for the comment!!!

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      its not just about boot and shutdown times….i have been using visual studio and sql like heavy apps and i know how colossal the difference is in multitasking easily and experiencing no hiccups. even plugging hdd with ssd it somehow seems like hdd is also behaving real quick, the software loads from ssd and hdd only has to load the file like a video file….running only hdd for all tasks really really slowed everything when ur working on huge development apps. infact the other pc my bro owns doesnt have any app and he is now used to the ssd performance, he doesnt want to go back to the old hdd wait times and hiccups. there are just alot of users going to use ssd now, TLC has made it ultra cheap and double the size making 120GB available to masses under 50$, so wats the wait?? a while ago 160gb hdd were similar priced…its all about human psychology, u wanna stick with the shitty old turtles or u wanna upgrade to pure awesomeness?
      btw let me tell u guys one gr8 thing: When on HDDD is ran the passmark performance test, the CPU i3-6100 score was 4800…when i upgraded to ssd the score is 5400! thats just marvelous! the hdd was also holding back the fifth gear of my new system to be honest, and things are tremendously hugely better now! not only the score is gr8, the system also feels gr8 and enthusiastic to work with 😉

      • blank

        You sound more like a power user than a typical consumer, whose PC use is 90% internet browsing, so my 2 year old post really didn’t apply to you.
        Things have changed a lot in the past couple years, and SSD costs are little more than HDD, for smaller units.

    • blank

      this aged well lol

  3. blank

    Great article.. The banner did not work. TY for helping me understand SSD a little more.

  4. blank

    Thanks. A lot of useful info here.

    It’s been 5+ years since I built my last computer, and SSD wasn’t an option due to cost and I needed a lot of storage, which I still have in external drives. Now, after 15 years not playing games, I’m building a gaming PC and seeing terms like M.2 and having no clue what it was. I’ll keep reading, but I think I’ll go with an SSD and drop the HDD for this build. I think 240GB is more than I will ever need (plus I still have the external drives for mass storage).

    It’s just a hunch, but I bet a lot of people complaining about the cost of an SSD probably upgrade their MB, CPU, and GPU every 6 months or a year ;-). I agree though, that if you need a lot of storage (several TB), then using SSDs is too expensive.

    PS. based on what I’ve read here, I don’t see why some people say to use two SSDs, a small one for the OS and a large one for data. That seems like an outdated HDD kind of thinking. It seems that one drive would cover all your needs (typical user).

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      separation of os/programs and data. this is great for efficient recovery of work environment. while you can have one partition, you do bloat your backups and have to deal w/dated data after restore. 2 partitions is more a “best practice” than an essential.

  5. blank

    Very helpful article explaining why IOPs matter. Made me eventually hit the BUY button on the amazon cart with 840 EVO 240GB ssd. BTW, your amazon hourly link is not working.

  6. blank

    Very nice and helpful article!

  7. blank

    what software did you use for this test?

  8. blank

    Pretty sure the reason why the Physical platter hard drive reduces speed and latency increases in the HD tune bench mark is because it’s accesssing different parts of the platters, the outer areas spin faster than the inner, same with CD’s so depending on where it accesses it goes faster or slower. I believe drives fill up the fast parts first, which is why after a drive is mostly full it seems to slow down, fragmentation of the data may play a part as well.
    SSDs are more constant in their speed, since it accesses differernt areas at the same speeds (no spinning disks). Although once nearing their end of life I believe SSDs do slow down as they loose capacity to write. Although I believe it takes a very very long time before that happens.

  9. blank

    Great read. Thanks 🙂

  10. blank

    Great article, my thanks to the author!

  11. blank

    Very nicely explained. Thanks

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    Barbara C. Smith

    Thanks Robert, great article, but I am new to this technology and some parts were a little
    too technical. Can anyone point me to a high-level overview of the subject?

  13. blank

    Best article on TB3 for sure. Thank you!

  14. blank

    Thanks for sharing this excellent article on HDD/SSD and IOPS !

  15. blank

    Thank you for this important information. It indeed explains the big three performance parameters which defines an SSD. Now I understand these specs which describe SSDs in the market. Continue with your useful work. To those who are interested, you check out some SSDs at https://www.flexxon.com/products/

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    I’m here because my ssd in hp laptop failed in 6 months. It was a kioxia and they changed it to sk hynix. 140 iops. Ssd fail is real and I’ve never had a hdd fail so quickly. Theory vs real world use at play here.

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    very nice blog.i got a lot of informatio.

  18. blank

    Very useful information. Thank you so much!

  19. blank

    i really enjoy and love your blog!

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