Anandtech's Crucial M4 perf. consistency (4k Random write QD=32) QUESTIONABLE?

rcarlos243

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Feb 17, 2014
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i was reading anandtech's review about Crucial M500 under performance consistency and it claims that

The improvement over the m4 is just insane though. Whereas the M500 sees its floor at roughly 2600 IOPS, the m4 will drop down to as low as 28 IOPS. That's slower than mechanical hard drive performance and around the speed of random IO in an mainstream ARM based tablet.

i have never heard that claim anywhere else.


is there any validity on anandtech's claim about measly 28 IOPS or anandtech is a sell out to crucial to urge people to upgrade?

is there any way to reproduce the test they did?


source:
http://anandtech.com/show/6884/crucial-micron-m500-review-960gb-480gb-240gb-120gb/3
 
Feb 25, 2011
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is there any way to reproduce the test they did?

Use any number of different tools to generate a 4k random workload over time, use IOMeter to sample the instantaneous latency over a period of 20+ minutes, and plot a graph?

They went into a little more detail in the Intel 3700 review, but it's basically spelled out in the review you linked too.

If you have an M4 you can test, I'd be curious to see if your results differ.
 

rcarlos243

Member
Feb 17, 2014
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Use any number of different tools to generate a 4k random workload over time, use IOMeter to sample the instantaneous latency over a period of 20+ minutes, and plot a graph?

They went into a little more detail in the Intel 3700 review, but it's basically spelled out in the review you linked too.

If you have an M4 you can test, I'd be curious to see if your results differ.

i downloaded the IOMeter program to test it but it seems like you need to be an engineer or something to just to be able to set the parameters for that program to do the job.

anyways here are the result of my benchmark on my crucial m4 256GB
note: the test was ran on HM67 Sandy Bridge SATA II 3GB/s limited laptop


4y19.png

x0c9.png

4jfc.png

qg98.png

m8fd.png


in comparison to Samsung 840 Pro

840-Pro-RAPID-Bench-IOPS.png
 
Feb 25, 2011
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Yeah, none of those benchmarks actually show performance consistency, really. They're probably showing average I/O over the course of the run, and not instantaneous.

It would be helpful if AT posted the IOMeter config file they use. Maybe if you email one of them.

This may help:

http://greg.porter.name/wiki/HowTo:iometer

I have been able to more or less duplicate ATs results with IOMeter on my own SSD, so I don't think they're far off the mark.
 
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BrightCandle

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Mar 15, 2007
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Well I have an M4 and I confirm that the service time for some IOs is in the seconds. I do get occasional drive lockups due to extremely low IOP performance very occasionally after I have been hitting the drive heavily. It recovers after a while and then its back to normal but it definitely shows up in real world usage.
 

rcarlos243

Member
Feb 17, 2014
69
2
71
Yeah, none of those benchmarks actually show performance consistency, really. They're probably showing average I/O over the course of the run, and not instantaneous.

It would be helpful if AT posted the IOMeter config file they use. Maybe if you email one of them.

This may help:

http://greg.porter.name/wiki/HowTo:iometer

I have been able to more or less duplicate ATs results with IOMeter on my own SSD, so I don't think they're far off the mark.

i followed the guide you linked and i ran it for about 2 hours, but my free space on the drive went from 60GB to 0KB

i closed the program and restarted my pc.

how do i get back my Free space as IOMeter took it all?
 

rcarlos243

Member
Feb 17, 2014
69
2
71
Well I have an M4 and I confirm that the service time for some IOs is in the seconds. I do get occasional drive lockups due to extremely low IOP performance very occasionally after I have been hitting the drive heavily. It recovers after a while and then its back to normal but it definitely shows up in real world usage.

im skeptical that it would take seconds.

i configured my m4 to run Thunderbird, Chrome with approx 30 tabs, truecrypt, musicbee, im messenger(YM, Skype, Google talk), steam, HDD regenerator, and Bitdefender at startup and my drive never freezes.

maybe your drive is defective?
 

BrightCandle

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Mar 15, 2007
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Its not reads that kick it off its writes. The installation of say 60GB followed by a lot of random writes is what sets it off. Normally isn't a problem for very long but it definitely happens.
 
Feb 25, 2011
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i followed the guide you linked and i ran it for about 2 hours, but my free space on the drive went from 60GB to 0KB

i closed the program and restarted my pc.

how do i get back my Free space as IOMeter took it all?

There should be a fil in C:\ called "iobw.tst" - delete it.