F2FS Results Mixed Against Microsoft's exFAT On Linux

When hitting the file-systems over USB with the two CompileBench workloads, F2FS was much faster than exFAT. NTFS remained to be the slowest of the file-system trio on Ubuntu Linux.

When it came to running exFAT on PostMark, its performance was about three times faster than F2FS.

These results are fairly surprising... For some disk workloads, the FUSE-based Microsoft exFAT file-system was faster than the in-kernel F2FS file-system. Earlier Phoronix tests have shown that F2FS from flash storage is already generally competitive with the popular Btrfs and EXT4 Linux file-systems. Seeing a user-space implementation of the Microsoft file-system outperforming the in-kernel "Flash-Friendly File-System" came as a shock. Then again, Tuxera claimed NTFS is the fastest file-system for Linux.

In the end it will be interesting to see how the F2FS situation plays out. While Samsung is presently leading the development of this open-source file-system, it stands slim chances of seeing deployments on consumer electronic devices from the company unless F2FS were also to be ported and widely available for Windows and OS X. Given the turnaround time there and that F2FS will likely need a few years to prove itself as a safe and reliable file-system, don't look for F2FS (or any other open-source file-system) to unseat Microsoft's exFAT in the immediate future.