I created a new VM in Google Compute Engine a few days ago, and assigned it an SSD disk, and then began wondering if it was really an SSD disk.
(Digression: I never appreciated the difference an SSD makes until the first time a Macbook Air awoke from sleep instantly. From that moment onwards, the time taken for my desktop at home to show its login screen has always felt irritatingly long)
So, this is a crude benchmark of a "regular" hard drive on my workstation:
$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1:
Timing cached reads: 20772 MB in 2.00 seconds = 10403.36 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 242 MB in 1.34 seconds = 180.53 MB/sec
By the way, the "fresh" disk division for a new VM looks something like this:
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 9.9G 734M 8.7G 8% /
udev 10M 0 10M 0% /dev
tmpfs 3.0G 104K 3.0G 1% /run
/dev/disk/by-uuid/foo 9.9G 734M 8.7G 8% /
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 6.0G 0 6.0G 0% /run/shm
foo above is really a long uuid, which I subsituted to avoid repeating. This is the output from hdparm, run within my VM:
agam@myvm:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/disk/by-uuid/foo
/dev/disk/by-uuid/foo:
Timing cached reads: 16996 MB in 2.00 seconds = 8506.48 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 310 MB in 3.02 seconds = 102.65 MB/sec
So that's ... confusing. The two seem pretty close (and the SSD seems slower!) Obviously, we're looking at the wrong metric. The big distinguishing factor for these two types of storage is seek time. So instead of hdparm, let's try ioping instead.
Here's the workstation with the hard drive first (run twice, first random then sequential):
$ sudo ioping -R /dev/sda1
--- /dev/sda1 (device 243.0 MiB) ioping statistics ---
450 requests completed in 3.0 s, 150 iops, 600.3 KiB/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 54 us / 6.7 ms / 74.1 ms / 6.5 ms
$ sudo ioping -RL /dev/sda1
--- /dev/sda1 (device 243.0 MiB) ioping statistics ---
1.8 k requests completed in 3.0 s, 600 iops, 150.1 MiB/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 648 us / 1.7 ms / 152.2 ms / 5.2 ms
And now ... here's the VM with the SSD:
agam@myvm:~$ sudo ioping -R /dev/disk/by-uuid/foo
--- /dev/disk/by-uuid/foo (device 10.0 Gb) ioping statistics ---
9020 requests completed in 3000.1 ms, 5016 iops, 19.6 mb/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 0.0/0.2/6.0/0.4 ms
agam@myvm:~$ sudo ioping -RL /dev/disk/by-uuid/foo
--- /dev/disk/by-uuid/foo (device 10.0 Gb) ioping statistics ---
1230 requests completed in 3002.0 ms, 439 iops, 109.6 mb/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 0.2/2.3/8.2/0.6 ms
Here is where you see a big difference ... a smaller one for the sequential case, but a huge one for the random case (at least an order of magnitude more).
So yeah, the SSD is legit.