Iometer
We have saved the hardest test for last. Iometer is the king of savage benchmarks, and we set it to run for 30 minutes by using a 4K random pattern, with a queue depth of 32 users, that takes in the entire capacity of the drives. Think of the test as pre-conditioning.
Speed is measured with respect to input/output operations per second (Iops), so the higher the better. The first test shows the maximum level achieved, but the second is more telling. It describes what happens when the SSDs fall into a steady-state speed, defined as when the drive is full and has to erase blocks before writing new ones, thus dropping performance.
The 4K random steady state is almost 2x that of the BX200 but, looking at it from a wider landscape, the performance drop-off is significant - the sustained speed is less than five per cent that of when it is fresh. You probably won't notice it going into this long-term steady state because it takes about nine minutes of sustained 4K load to do so, though it is worth bearing in mind if you plan to write lots of small files on a regular basis.
