SSD Write Performance – IOPS Confusion Due to Poor Benchmarking Techniques

Over the last few years, the proliferation of solid state disk (SSD) based IO solutions triggered an entire benchmarking frenzy, comparing the throughput potential of SSD and hard disk drive (HDD) components, respectively. In most of these performance studies, little is known about the actual HW, OS, and SW setup, benchmark environment, benchmark tool, validation techniques used to asses the benchmark results, or even the actual workload distribution used to conduct the studies. Nevertheless, in most of these studies, compared to HDD drives, rather impressive IOPS SSD values are reported for read and write IO operations, respectively.