Daniel Nashed's Blog

USB and SSD performance compared

For a workshop I am looking into what type of USB sticks we can want to use to boot up Ubuntu from a stick.
Prices and performance differs and there is orders of magnitude difference between them.
After testing I just ordered a couple of additional USB sticks for more testing.
But the list below shows the difference quite well.

There is a easy to use Windows tool to quickly test the performance "winsat".

• It's pretty clear that a USB 2.0 is very slow. That's not just because of the USB 2.0 standard. This also greatly depends on the chips used.
• Good USB 3.0 hardware is dramatically better performing.
• An older Samsung NVMe is pretty good.
• A current NVMe plays in a different league
  
  

I might write up another


winsat disk -drive E


--- Old USB 2.0 stick ---

Very slow even for copying data


Disk  Random 16.0 Read                          8.97 MB/s
Disk  Sequential 64.0 Read                     17.79 MB/s
Disk  Sequential 64.0 Write                     5.98 MB/s
Average Read Time with Sequential Writes       12.861 ms
Latency: 95th Percentile                      596.072 ms
Latency: Maximum                             1170.906 ms
Average Read Time with Random Writes          173.835 ms
Total Run Time 00:08:10.41


--- Current Samsung FIT stick ---

Quite good from transfer rates and latency


Disk  Random 16.0 Read                        53.69 MB/s
Disk  Sequential 64.0 Read                   147.78 MB/s
Disk  Sequential 64.0 Write                   58.54 MB/s
Average Read Time with Sequential Writes       3.451 ms
Latency: 95th Percentile                       5.336 ms
Latency: Maximum                              11.383 ms
Average Read Time with Random Writes           3.572 ms
Total Run Time 00:00:44.84


--- NVMe internal disk on an older notebook  ---

I would have expected better read performance.
But the latency is dramatically better than for an USB stick!


Disk  Random 16.0 Read                       321.10 MB/s
Disk  Sequential 64.0 Read                   433.78 MB/s
Disk  Sequential 64.0 Write                   97.33 MB/s
Average Read Time with Sequential Writes       0.620 ms
Latency: 95th Percentile                       1.839 ms
Latency: Maximum                              14.415 ms
Average Read Time with Random Writes           0.591 ms
Total Run Time 00:00:40.08


--- NVMe internal disk on my new notebook  ---

Dramatic increase in read and write performance.
Another 10 times better latency as well!


Disk  Random 16.0 Read                       1508.35 MB/s
Disk  Sequential 64.0 Read                   4414.35 MB/s
Disk  Sequential 64.0 Write                  1138.50 MB/s
Average Read Time with Sequential Writes        0.081 ms
Latency: 95th Percentile                        0.152 ms
Latency: Maximum                                1.208 ms
Average Read Time with Random Writes            0.084 ms
Total Run Time 00:00:07.33

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