Some time ago I discovered that the BIOS setting for my disks were IDE and I read that it could be changed to AHCI, which would be better when using SATA disks. However, I also read that there might not be that big difference, so it took me a while to actually change (through REGEDIT and then BIOS.)
Out of curiosity I did some tests before and after, and I was very surprised. For sequential access in lower IO sizes the performance was almost doubled! Both in terms of IOPS and throughput.
The disk is a Samsung Spinpoint F3, 1TB (with 300 MB partition in the beginning of the disk).
This is using IOMETER with 512 bytes blocks, all read and all sequential, before the change to AHCI. Around 28000 IOPS, 13 MB/s throughput and average latency at 0.14 ms.
Here is after AHCI is enabled:
What I can extract from this is that the IOPS rise from 28000 to amazing 50000, while the latency was cut in half and the MB throughput was dubbled.
Here is a test with ATTO Disk Benchmark. I found that already on IDE mode there was excellent throughput on larger IO sizes, around 145 MB/second on 16 KB (and up) IO sizes, while on 4 KB I got around 80 MB/s.
Here is finally after AHCI enabled, the 4 KB io size increased the throughput with 40 MB/s up to almost 120 MB/s.
I was actually feeling quite a bit around this. Is it actually excepted to get this large differences (in benchmarks) with the shift from IDE to AHCI mode?
Out of curiosity I did some tests before and after, and I was very surprised. For sequential access in lower IO sizes the performance was almost doubled! Both in terms of IOPS and throughput.
The disk is a Samsung Spinpoint F3, 1TB (with 300 MB partition in the beginning of the disk).
This is using IOMETER with 512 bytes blocks, all read and all sequential, before the change to AHCI. Around 28000 IOPS, 13 MB/s throughput and average latency at 0.14 ms.
Here is after AHCI is enabled:
What I can extract from this is that the IOPS rise from 28000 to amazing 50000, while the latency was cut in half and the MB throughput was dubbled.
Here is a test with ATTO Disk Benchmark. I found that already on IDE mode there was excellent throughput on larger IO sizes, around 145 MB/second on 16 KB (and up) IO sizes, while on 4 KB I got around 80 MB/s.
Here is finally after AHCI enabled, the 4 KB io size increased the throughput with 40 MB/s up to almost 120 MB/s.
I was actually feeling quite a bit around this. Is it actually excepted to get this large differences (in benchmarks) with the shift from IDE to AHCI mode?