What is the 1-MB I/O performance of Virtual HD ATA Device on Azure VM?

The I/O performance of reading and writing 1-MB files of a Virtual HD ATA Device can be measured by running SQLIO with multiple 1024-KB blocks with a large stripe factor.

Here is the read performance test of Virtual HD ATA Device on Azure VM with 1024-KB blocks.

C:\fyicenter\SQLIO>sqlio -LS -kR -b1024 -i64 -f64 -t1 -s30 -p0

1 thread reading for 300 secs from file testfile.dat
  using 1024KB IOs over 65536KB stripes with 64 IOs per run
  affinity on cpu number 0
size of file testfile.dat needs to be: 4294967296 bytes
current file size:  268435456 bytes
need to expand by:  4026531840 bytes
expanding testfile.dat ... done.
initialization done
CUMULATIVE DATA:
throughput metrics:
IOs/sec:   420.06
MBs/sec:   420.06
latency metrics:
Min_Latency(ms): 0
Avg_Latency(ms): 1
Max_Latency(ms): 1027
histogram:
ms: 0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24+
%: 75 19  3  1  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  2

Here is the write performance test of Virtual HD ATA Device on Azure VM on 64-KB blocks.

C:\fyicenter\SQLIO>sqlio -LS -kW -b1024 -i64 -f64 -t1 -s30 

1 thread writing for 300 secs to file testfile.dat
  using 1024KB IOs over 65536KB stripes with 64 IOs per run
  affinity on cpu number 0
initialization done
CUMULATIVE DATA:
throughput metrics:
IOs/sec:    39.48
MBs/sec:    39.48
latency metrics:
Min_Latency(ms): 13
Avg_Latency(ms): 24
Max_Latency(ms): 421
histogram:
ms: 0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24+
%:  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  1  8 17 18 15 11  7  4  3  2  1 13

Reading/writing speeds of 1-MB blocks, 420.06/39.48 MBs/sec, are much higher than reading/writing speeds of 64-KB blocks, 232.13/12.43 MBs/sec.

⇒ Impact of Sharing Virtual HD with OS

⇐ Virtual HD ATA Device on Server 2016 - 64-KB Benchmark

⇑ I/O Tests on Azure Virtual HD and Storage

⇑⇑ SQLIO Disk I/O Benchmark Test Tutorials