Inspired  by some visibility in storagemojo.com, I decided to provide some more plots on the Flash storage performance.

Thanks for many comments.We begin our observations on measuring the write performance by Nokia N800 on its Flash storage device. The data is written and read on blocks of 512 bytes, to achieve good performance. This time I decided to use standard Linux tools for the benchmarking. 

So, the first observation is that we achieve write performance close to 1Mbit/s for small (less than 1 MB) files. In the write performance test the Linux command dd was used to copy files from /dev/urandom to a destination file in the Flash storage. The operation was timed by using /usr/bin/time, since the default dd command on N800 did not provide timing statistics.

The above figure shows the read performance from the N800 Internet tablet. For the read test I used dd to transfer data from a file on the Flash storage to /dev/null. Now we can see that the read bandwidth is in the order of 250 Mbit/s.So what can we conclude from the graphs. We are looking on just a single device, and especially a mobile device where the processing power of the device may prevent us from achieving the highest performance provided by the Flash storage. So the results are not very generic. Also, the read performance is much better than for writing and is certainly enough to play movies. The write performance instead, is poor and would not allow the user to receive large files with the full bandwidth achievable by the device’s WLAN.For now, this should be it for the N800 benchmarking, since we have already the great new N810 at hand.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 6:42 pm and is filed under Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.