Storage performance: Intel Z87 vs. ASMedia ASM1062 vs. LSI 9211-8i

During my VT-d verification on the ASRock Z86 Extreme6 I took the opportunity to compare the performance of three different storage controllers, namely:

  • Intel Z87 (onboard)
  • ASMedia ASM1062 (onboard)
  • LSI 9211-8i (PCI-Express 8x add in card)

Below is a summary of the test setup and the results of the tests.

Test System

Native performance

Comparison of the three controllers are done with the simple hard disk benchmark tool in Ubuntu 13.10.

SSD Performance

Average read [MB/s] Average write [MB/s] Average access time [ms]
Intel Z87 516.6 527.4 0.03
ASMedia ASM1062 402.2 398.4 0.04
LSI 9211-8i 546.9 521.8 0.04

Intel-SSD ASMedia-SSD LSI-SSD

HDD Performance

Average read [MB/s] Average write [MB/s] Average access time [ms]
Intel Z87 140.3 136.1 12.4
ASMedia ASM1062 140.3 136.0 12.5
LSI 9211-8i 140.3 136.6 12.4

Intel-HDD ASMedia-HDD LSI-HDD

Passthrough Performance

Passthrough performance is measured with ESXi 5.5 installed on a USB memory and the LSI card passed through to a VM. The VM is running the same version as in the above benchmarks, ubuntu 13.10. The performance is only run with the LSI card. I really tried getting passthrough working with the ASMedia controller as this would open up to some interesting storage opportunities with this board. However, Ubuntu recognized the controller but did not find any disk attached to it. Also, now that I think about it, I have no idea why I did not think about trying to pass through the Z87 controller. Anyway, here is the comparison, SSD and HDD combined.

Average read [MB/s] Average write [MB/s] Average access time [ms]
SSD – Native 546.9 521.8 0.04
SSD – Passthrough 519.3 520.2 0.06
HDD – Native 140.3 136.6 12.4
HDD – Passthrough 140.3 136.4 12.4

LSI-SSD LSI-SSD-passt

LSI-HDD LSI-HDD-passt

Final thoughts

The ASMedia controller is not capable of handling the performance of modern SSDs. For mechanical drives there is practically no difference between the three different controllers.

I had an idea of using the Intel controller for the ESXi datastore and pass through the ASMedia controller to a VM. Then it would be possible to setup software RAID for the drives connected to the ASMedia controller. This is a solution working very well for me today with the LSI card, but it would have been nice to have an all-in-one solution.

There are some performance impacts on reads when passing through the LSI card to a VM. I have not investigated this further but it might very well be benchmark technical reasons behind it.

3 thoughts on “Storage performance: Intel Z87 vs. ASMedia ASM1062 vs. LSI 9211-8i

  1. I was quite surprised about my SSD performance when I connected it to Sata8 on my Mainboard. I noticed it is controlled by ASmedia and blamed the Linux drivers for it. Thanks for confirming it is a general problem.

  2. I can not speak English, so I use translator to write

    This post has helped me buy a pci sata card
    (ASMedia ASM1062 vs. LSI 9211-8i)

    Thank you 🙂

    In South Korea

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