Testing Out The SSD Mode In Btrfs

With 32 threads of random reads, the delta between using the SSD mode widened and it was not in favor of this SSD mode.

The slower performance remained with random writes.

The Btrfs SSD mode ended out our last test still being slower than not using the SSD mount option.

If you were hoping to simply mount a Btrfs file-system on a solid-state drive and expect it to be faster, guess again. Simply mounting the file-system with the SSD option in all but one test had either led to the same level of performance or actually much worse performance. The OCZ Vertex SATA 2.0 SSD did not play nicely with disabling the write cache, but fortunately we have other drives and test systems around for benchmarking. We will continue studying the SSD performance on Btrfs and other Linux file-systems and will be back with more results as they are completed. We will also be testing out Btrfs with the latest Linux 2.6.30 kernel, etc. Btrfs right now does not have a quantitative performance advantage over the EXT4 file-system as our previous tests have shown, and this SSD mount option is no magic bullet, at least not yet.

Discuss this article in our forums, IRC channel, or email the author. You can also follow our content via RSS and on social networks like Facebook, Identi.ca, and Twitter (@Phoronix and @MichaelLarabel). Subscribe to Phoronix Premium to view our content without advertisements, view entire articles on a single page, and experience other benefits.