Performance

For performance testing, I hooked the Viper Gaming VPN100 up to our test bench and ran through our normal SSD test suite. The first test I ran is most peoples go-to because they love seeing the big sequential read and write speeds. With CrystalDiskMark I only focused on those two sequential results. For the read speeds the VPN100 didn’t do too bad at 3125.6, this was lower than the “up to” rating on the packaging. But this is also a smaller drive than the 1TB and 2TB models. But at 3125 this put it behind the WD Black’s which are high-end drives and the new MP600 which is a PCI Gen 4 drive. The write performance was similar, falling behind the WD Black’s and the MP600 but still ahead of everything else tested. The write speeds were a lot lower than the read speeds at 2099.5 MB/s.

I did take a look at Random IOPS while in CrystalDiskMark as well. For this, I focused on the two 8 queue depth and 8 thread tests which if you are looking at CrystalDiskMark results is the second line. I put both of the IOPS results together in this graph to get an overall idea of the drive's performance. The read IOPS were a lot lower than the write IOPS and it held the drive back. But impressively the write IOPS were actually the fastest of all of the drives tested including the new PCI Gen4 drive. While a touch behind the WD Black drives the VPN100 looks especially impressive when you compare it with the other drive tested.

Next using AS SSD I took a look at the copy benchmark results which are timed file transfers. The program tests three different file types to get a mix of file types and sized including ISO’s, program, and game files. I combine all three together to keep the overall result a little easier to see. In the case of the VPN100, it was extremely fast on the ISO files but not as quick on the program files when compared with the SN750. The MP600, on the other hand, shows that great sequential results don’t always mean amazing performance in every test.

My next two tests were both using Passmark’s Performance Test 9. The first graph has the advanced benchmark results. This is an extra benchmark tucked away in performance test 9 where you can create your own hard drive or SSD tests. To keep things simple for people retesting I have tested using the four defaults though. These are all focused on different aspects of enterprise use including file and web servers workload types, a database workload, and a workstation. The VPN100 did really well in these tests actually. The web and file server results are close to the MP600 and only the new SN750 is faster. The Database result was behind the SN750 again but close to the MP600 as was the workstation test. The second graph is simpler, this is running the full Performance Test 9 disk mark test suite which tests a few different areas and puts an overall score. The three WD Black drives fill up most of the top and the MP600 with its ultra-fast sequential results tops the chart but the VPN100 isn’t far behind the older WD Black drive and is well ahead of the other drives tested.

Going back to IOPS I used Anvil’s Storage Utilities to check out the Random IOPS at a queue depth of 16 and this time around at just one thread. Again the read and write results are stacks because the combination of the two is the whole of the drive. The 148996 IOPS for the read was about 20k less than the WD Black drives and even more for the MP600. But it was the write IOPS that ends up setting a few of the drives really apart. The VPN100, like in a lot of the previous tests didn’t do bad. But wasn’t in the same class as the WD Blacks and the MP600 for the write IOPS. Even the WD Blue was a little faster on the writes as well.

My last tests were still using Anvil’s Storage Utilities. This time I manually ran queue depth testing on both read and writes. I like this test because it gives a good look at how the controller handles when it starts to get overloaded. For the read testing the VPN100 did well starting off nearly the quickest at a queue depth of 1 and scaling up well with just the WD Black, MP600, and Intel 750 Series being faster at a queue depth of 128. More importantly, the VPN100 continued to climb in speed all the way up to that point. You can see in the graph that a lot of the other drives start to fall off at a queue depth of 16 or 32. That same set of tests, but with writes had a completely different result. The VPN100 was quick early and did well to a queue depth of 8. But after that is actually got slower for each result higher than that which isn’t a great sign on how it handles those high queue depth write loads.