Thursday, 22 Mar, 2012

In October 2011 I got an mSATA SSD because my Dell M6600 had a tempting mSATA (SATA II - 300Mbps) slot which made me think:"a small SSD may come in handy here!".

The effective available space is 111GB and the controller should be the Sandforce 2181.

The small OCZ nocti mini mSATA SSD inside my M6600.

I experienced first person that the SSD performance is not so "WOW, that was fast!".

But they are not so bad either, since this thingie results 3 to 4 times faster than an average velociraptor!

I did some benchmarking from the normal Windows 7 installed by Dell into my original (spinning) hdd included with my system. In other words, I wasn't booting my OS from this tiny SSD: I was just formatting and running the benchies on it (screenshots below).

What I specifically wanted to asses was if there was some difference between formatting the SSD with:

  • A default NTFS cluster size.
  • A 4k NTFS cluster size.
  • An 8k NTFS cluster size.

My results are very similar one-another and I found that, even if the majority of your files seem to be between 4k and 8k, this SSD seems optimized for the "default" NTFS cluster size.

It's also worthwhile noting that my results are far from the marketed "280Mb/s - 260Mb/s" from the OCZ website. That's because marketers, while publicizing their SSD performance, prefer to refer to their benchmarks using "compressible data".

At the moment I'm using this SSD as a single partition with a default NTFS Cluster Size.

It is attached to Hyper-V as a pass-through disk.

I installed into it an instance of MS Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with:

  • An Active Directory Domain.
  • MS SQL Server Express 2008 R2 (running as a "least privilege" instance with its own user accounts).
  • A secure Sharepoint Foundation 2010 instance with Kerberos (running with its own user accounts too).

And I must admit all works pretty well!

Here's my benchmark results:

Default NTFS Cluster Size.

CrystalDiskMark:

ocz-nocti-120-msata-default-ntfs-cluster-size-crystaldiskmark

AS SSD Benchmark (MB/s):

ocz-nocti-120-msata-default-ntfs-cluster-size-as-ssd-bench-MB

AS SSD Benchmark (IOPS):

ocz-nocti-120-msata-default-ntfs-cluster-size-as-ssd-bench-IOPS

4k NTFS Cluster Size.

CrystalDiskMark:

ocz-nocti-120-msata-4k-ntfs-cluster-size-crystaldiskmark

AS SSD Benchmark (MB/s):

ocz-nocti-120-msata-4k-ntfs-cluster-size-as-ssd-bench-MB

AS SSD Benchmark (IOPS):

ocz-nocti-120-msata-4k-ntfs-cluster-size-as-ssd-bench-IOPS

8k NTFS Cluster Size.

CrystalDiskMark:

ocz-nocti-120-msata-8k-ntfs-cluster-size-crystaldiskmark

AS SSD Benchmark (MB/s):

ocz-nocti-120-msata-8k-ntfs-cluster-size-as-ssd-bench-MB

AS SSD Benchmark (IOPS):

ocz-nocti-120-msata-8k-ntfs-cluster-size-as-ssd-bench-IOPS

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