Storage Performance

What Does Storage Performance Mean?

Storage performance is the measure of how well storage devices perform, especially hard drives. This is measured by testing the drive and comparing its performance to standardized metrics. Storage performance metrics help IT and IS administrators judge the effectiveness of their storage system and their ability to support the business organization. Storage performance is usually measured in terms of capacity, throughput and utilization.

Techopedia Explains Storage Performance

Advances in computer technology have mostly concentrated on processing power and not much on the I/O and storage component. This is why the CPU and GPU have advanced in leaps and bounds while system storage like the hard disk drive has only advanced moderately. Storage capacity has also improved dramatically, but the I/O performance of the hard disk cannot keep up with the power of the processor. This is because of the difference in hardware architecture; the CPU is purely electronic while the hard disk is electromechanical and is quite limited by its mechanical parts. New storage options like the solid state drive aim to erase this performance gap.

Storage performance has become somewhat of a bottleneck in computing, which is why storage devices must adhere to metrics for customers and IT professionals to be able to make better decisions. There are various organizations that help to standardize metrics, including the Storage Performance Council (SPC), Microsoft Exchange Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP) and the Standard Performance Corporation (SPEC).

The following are some common storage performance metrics:

• Input/output operations per second (IOPS)
• Transaction processing workload
• Meant time between failures (MTBF)
• Meant time to recovery (MTTR)
• Response time
• Read/write speed
• Percent utilization