  Modern external memory is represented by several device classes. At present,
HDD, SATA SSD and NVMe SSD are widely used. Recently ultra-low latency SSD such
as Intel Optane became available on the market. Each of these types exhibits
it's own pattern for throughput, latency and parallelism. To achieve the
highest performance one has to pick an appropriate I/O interface provided by
the operating system. In this work we present a detailed overview and
evaluation of modern storage reading performance with regard to available Linux
synchronous and asynchronous interfaces. While throughout this work we aim for
the highest throughput we also measure latency and CPU usage. We provide this
report in hope the detailed results could be interesting to both researchers
and practitioners.
