While PCI-e Flash cards show great performance, I am often asked about alternatives, as price for PCI-e cards is still significant and not acceptable for small companies and startups.

Intel 320 SSD appears to be a popular drive with a quite acceptable price.
I wrote about write performance of these cards, and now let’s take look on a random read workload.

I used a Cisco UCS C250 as base hardware, comparing in it:

• regular RAID10 over 8 SAS 2.5 disks
• single Intel 320 SSD directly attached to a HighPoint RocketRAID 2300
• two Intel 320 SSD in hardware RAID0 mode, attached to a LSI SAS9211-4i controller

For simulating the workload I used sysbench’s fileio random reads. Scripts and raw results available on Launchpad.

Let’s see throughput results:

And response times:

As conclusion, this card provides great read performance. A single card provides 5-8x better throughput and 10-14x better response time. Striping helps to increase throughput in 8-10x and response time in 10-22x.

While there are questions about write performance (see my previous post), I think this card is very suitable for read-intensive tasks, where you can expect significant improvements.

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