Amazon Solid State Drive Benchmarks

One big missing feature from the cloud and namely Amazon was its disk speed or disk i/o performance.

Here at CURTIS Digital we care a lot of about speed, as an early adopter of solid state drives I have been on the lookout for a server offering more specifically a cloud offering that could let us leverage the speed we have on all of our workstations for our deployed applications. This would also alleviate a lot of the diskI/O related limitations and obstacles associated with the cloud.

I get a lot of questions about what my workstation is, so let me share some insight. (Warning overkill) I run 3 different solid state drives. I assure you each has a good purpose.

OCZ Revo Drive 3 x2 -480GB – this is a PCIe drive that is bootable and awesome
OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPs 240 GB – connected via sata3
Intel 520 128 GB – connected via sata2

As for the Dev and PM teams it’s a combination of Intel 520’s or OCZ Vertex 3. Long story short, locally things are really fast.

Now to the cloud… one thing i wanted to do was make sure we had an accurate view and expectation of what Amazon has done with abstracted SSD access. Things like access time, IOps and latency are really important in any storage medium. Yet, given the premium cost and hype I wanted to make sure that we had a good baseline.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ – hi1.4xlarge

Original Amazon Press Release http://ow.ly/dd8we

Enjoy the benchmarks below and please let me know if you have any more specific questions.