White Paper
NVMe SSD Write Performance
Overview
BittWare’sData Recorder reference design captures up to 200 Gb/s high-speed sensor data to NVMe solid-state drives (SSDs). This gives users an open architecture to build any data recorder system they require—but a common question we hear is“How many drives are required for a given sustained data rate?”
We want to address this question as it’s often assumed the calculation is a simple one: look at an SSD vendor’s drive specification for write speed, and divide up the required maximum sustained bandwidth for the application, add a bit of margin, and you have your number of RAID0 (striped) drives required. The challenge is that write figure on the SSD spec sheet is never sustainable for the long record times of our high-performance customers.
Let’s look at some real-world performance figures using common SSD drive types and dig into the reasons why sustained write isn’t as simple as read speeds. We’ll then conclude with some r