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Short answer: You can study AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) in AnandTech’s published methodology articles, but the reviewed sources do not provide a public download for the original trace files or runner. ATSB replayed recorded operating-system and application I/O against a test drive; matching its published summary statistics is not enough to reproduce the test. Unless you have the original traces and can reproduce the original conditions, describe your own test as an ATSB-inspired workload—not an exact ATSB run.
What AnandTech Storage Bench measures
ATSB is a trace-replay benchmark, not a simple test of peak sequential read or write speed. AnandTech recorded I/O requests generated by operating-system and application activity, replayed those requests against the SSD under test, and analyzed the drive’s responses. In the 2013 methodology article, reviewer Kristian Vättö described it as an application-trace test: “we record all IO requests made to a test system, then play them back on the drive we’re measuring and run statistical analysis on the drive’s responses.”
The result describes how a drive performed under a particular captured workload and the metrics AnandTech reported. It does not establish how the drive will perform in every application, and results from different ATSB generations are not automatically comparable.
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Which ATSB generation are you looking at?
| Generation or workload | Purpose and context | How to interpret it |
|---|---|---|
| 2011 Light | A more everyday-use pattern, including web browsing, photo consumption and editing, video playback, application installations, and gaming. AnandTech described it as less write-intensive than Heavy, but more write-intensive than its earlier 2010 testing. | Keep its workload and its reported read, write, combined throughput, and disk-busy-time results distinct from Heavy and Destroyer. |
| 2011 Heavy, also called MOASB | A high-I/O, write-intensive workload intended to place substantial write load on the SSD and expose behavior associated with garbage collection. Its scenarios included downloads, application installation, file copies, multitasking, photo and HTML editing, browsing, games, virus scanning, email and documents, and a Visual Studio 2008 Chromium build. | Read its throughput and disk-busy-time results with its write-heavy bias in mind; do not treat them as a universal measure of SSD speed. |
| 2013 The Destroyer | A larger application trace intended to examine performance after prolonged random I/O and include I/O consistency in the metrics. Its scenarios covered photo synchronization and editing, gaming, virtualization, productivity, video playback, and application development. | Preserve the test generation, platform, large trace, and consistency-oriented context when comparing published results. |
What the 2011 workloads contained
Heavy: a write-intensive workload
AnandTech’s 2013 article reports that the 2011 Heavy workload wrote 106.32 GB. It contained 2,168,893 read operations and 1,783,447 write operations. Of all operations, 28% were 4 KB, 10% were 16 KB, 10% were 32 KB, and 4% were 64 KB. The article also reports that 42% of operations were sequential, the average queue depth was 4.625 I/Os, and 59% of operations occurred at queue depth one.
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Those figures help characterize the workload, but they are not a recipe for recreating it: they summarize the captured requests and do not provide their full sequence or original setup.
Light: a more typical-use pattern
The 2011 Light workload represented activities such as browsing the web, consuming and editing photos, watching video, installing applications, and gaming. AnandTech reported performance as average MB/s and disk-busy time, with read, write, and combined views. Disk-busy time excludes idle time, so it provides a different view from throughput alone. AnandTech cautioned that these tests by themselves were not enough to characterize a drive.
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What changed with 2013’s The Destroyer
The 2013 update used a Windows 8 Pro x64 test platform and a larger application trace. Its scenarios involved applications including Photoshop CS6, Lightroom 4, Dropbox, Steam and several games, VirtualBox, Chrome, IE10, Outlook, Windows 8, AxCrypt, uTorrent, AdAware, and Visual Studio 2012. Tasks could overlap, including background system backups during other activity.
AnandTech reported 38.83 million reads, 10.98 million writes, and 49.8 million total I/O operations in The Destroyer trace. It moved 1,583.02 GB read and 875.62 GB written, with an average queue depth of approximately 5.5. These are the article’s historical workload figures, not current performance estimates for modern SSDs.
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The original article also described long run times: the fastest drive AnandTech had seen at publication finished in 10 hours, high-performance SSDs commonly took around 12–13 hours, and mainstream drives closer to 24 hours. These observations describe the drives and test conditions of that period; they do not predict how long a modern system or drive will take.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Can you download or run the original ATSB?
The reviewed AnandTech methodology articles explain the benchmark, but do not document a public download for its original runner or trace files. In an AnandTech Forums thread titled “Question – How to test AnandTech Storage Bench(ATSB)”, a participant responding on September 1, 2021, said the workloads would have to be reverse engineered from reviews. That forum reply is evidence of the difficulty reported at that time; it does not establish whether the original software or traces are available now, or what licensing or authorization may apply.
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How to use ATSB results or make a modern approximation
- Identify the exact workload generation. Check whether a result is for 2011 Light, 2011 Heavy/MOASB, or 2013 The Destroyer. Do not merge their figures as though they were one standardized test.
- Read the methodology and result together. Use AnandTech’s published article to understand the workload scenarios, platform, operation mix, and metrics reported for that result.
- Compare like with like. For 2011 Heavy, consider read, write, and combined average throughput alongside disk-busy time. For The Destroyer, retain its larger-trace and I/O-consistency context.
- Label a newly designed test accurately. If you build a modern approximation, document the platform, software, workload, drive state, and measurement method. Call it ATSB-inspired rather than an exact ATSB reproduction unless you have the original trace and reproduce its conditions.
- Do not reconstruct the trace from summary totals. Matching operation counts, transfer totals, queue depth, or broad scenario categories cannot recover the original request sequence or test conditions.
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