Performance benchmarks with the latest internal release (0.8.0)  show that the read/write performance of Dispersed Storage went up by 2x (again!).  We're now generally seeing realized throughput rates in the 20-30 MBps range (equal to 160-320 Mpbs) though a single Accesser (client) on a dsNet.  This level of performance is well beyond the theoretical maximum that we thought we'd get to in this initial release.  (So it is a good thing that our developers are better at performance improvements than they predicting the theotical maximum for performance!)

To put that in perspective, we ran some apple-to-apples comparisons between a dsNet and a local hard drive.  The test we ran was reading and writing a 1 GB file on both a local (desktop PC) hard drive and a dsNet over a 1 Gbps connection.  It turns out that the dsNet was a bit faster for the write and a bit slower for the the read vs. a local hard drive.  The results are in this chart:

Overall, this is a huge deal.  This level of performance is about 100x where we thought we'd end up for this release.  Because we are now providing hard drive level performance through regular hard drive interfaces (Block, iSCSI, etc.), we really are optomisic about the potential for Dispersed Storage.

Going forward, we are confident that we'll be able to increase the performance of dsNets even further and ultimately consistently exceed hard drive performance.

Chris