File-System Benchmarks On The Intel X25-E SSD

Late last month we looked at the Intel X25-E Extreme SSD on Linux. We ran this high-performance solid-state drive within a System76 Serval Notebook and compared its performance to a Seagate Momentus 7200.2 SATA HDD. During that testing we were just using the default EXT3 file-system, but now we have taken the Intel X25-E SSD for another spin as we looked at its performance when using the ReiserFS, JFS, XFS, EXT3, and EXT4 file-systems.

We used the System76 Serval Notebook for our tests with its Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processor, Intel Mobile 4 Series Chipset, 4GB of system memory, the 32GB Intel SSDSA2SH032G1GN SATA SSD, and a NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX Mobile GPU. For our testing we were using an Ubuntu 9.04 development release with the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, GNOME 2.25.91, X Server 1.5.99.902, xf86-video-nv 2.1.12, Mesa 7.3, OpenJDK 1.4, and GCC 4.3.3. We had tested the ReiserFS, JFS, XFS, EXT3, and EXT4 file-systems when performing a clean install of Ubuntu 9.04 each time that occupied the entire 32GB solid-state drive.

The benchmarks we ran with the Phoronix Test Suite were timed ImageMagick compilation, Parallel BZIP2 compression, LZMA compression, LAME MP3 encoding, GnuPG, Bork File Encrypter, IOzone, and Flexible IO Tester. We previously have provided real world benchmarks of the EXT4 file-system and other Linux disk tests, but in this article we are just looking at how different file-systems perform on the high-performance Intel X25-E SSD. During testing all Ubuntu Linux settings were left at their defaults (including disk mount options).