What Performance to Expect from Intel P4510 U.2 NVME? Best Way to Verify?

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1

Hello,

I’ve got an Intel P4510 4 TB. Storage Review has the specs here: Intel SSD DC P4510 Review - StorageReview.com

I can see that it’s connected at PCIe 3.0x4 speeds (or, as lspci describes it, 8 GT/s x4).

@mercenary_sysadmin has hammered into my thick skull that manufacturers lie on their specs, so I’m curious what the best way to test actual read/write performance on this disk is to see if I’m getting the performance I should?

Does someone have a script they like? Does for testing the drive’s best-case I/O, do you format as ZFS and disable sync, or use something else?

2

Coincidentally, I’ve also been testing an Intel P4510 4TB U.2 drive recently, using fio for the tests. Please see the following results.
I didn’t run ZFS on it, just used the plain ext4 filesystem. However, it can serve as a baseline for performance testing.

  "jobs" : [
    {
      "jobname" : "intel.p4510-4k.randread",
      "groupid" : 0,
      "error" : 0,
      "eta" : 0,
      "elapsed" : 61,
      "job options" : {
        "name" : "intel.p4510-4k.randread",
        "filename" : "/dev/nvme0n1",
        "direct" : "1",
        "rw" : "randread",
        "bs" : "4k",
        "iodepth" : "32",
        "numjobs" : "4",
        "runtime" : "60",
        "ioengine" : "libaio"
      },
      "read" : {
        "io_bytes" : 194968903680,
        "io_kbytes" : 190399320,
        "bw_bytes" : 3249427570,
        "bw" : 3173269,
        "iops" : 793317.278045,
        "runtime" : 60001,
        "total_ios" : 47599830,
        "short_ios" : 0,
        "drop_ios" : 0,
        "slat_ns" : {
          "min" : 1400,
          "max" : 1129238,
          "mean" : 2503.451923,
          "stddev" : 1315.159265,
          "N" : 47599830
        },
        "clat_ns" : {
3

How did this do? In my experience the real-world throughput limit for PCIe 3.0 x4 is around 3.3GB/s. I would expect the drive to meet that number on large block sequential reads, perhaps with the queue depth at something greater than one.

4

One more question… How’s power management with that drive? I’ve had my eye on that exact model.

It’s on very short list of enterprise/datacenter drives marketed as power-efficient so I speculate it’ll respond positively to various NVMe power directives. Unlike my Micron which knows only how to burn max electricity just like its Mellanox neighbor.

:fire:

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