Linux 3.8 File-System Testing From A SATA 3.0 HDD

Most often when carrying out any Linux file-system benchmarks -- or really, any benchmarks in general -- on Phoronix it's using solid-state storage. SSDs are just too great to pass up with their incredible performance. However, for those still using rotating media, here's a collection of file-system benchmarks from the new Linux 3.8 kernel when tested on a Serial ATA 3.0 Western Digital hard drive.

Recently for an unrelated project I picked up a Western Digital 500GB WD5000AZRX hard drive. The Western Digital Caviar Green WD5000AZRX features a Serial ATA 3.0 (6.0 Gb/s) interface, 64MB cache, IntelliPower, and read/write power consumption of 3.60 Watts and 2.10 Watts for idle. Anyhow, this Western Digital 500GB SATA 3.0 Green HDD is what's being used for this Linux 3.8 file-system benchmarking.

This HDD benchmarking comes after a few other 3.8 file-system articles already on Phoronix: NILFS2: A Slow But Dependable Linux File-System, F2FS File-System Runs Great On SDHC Storage, F2FS File-System Shows Hope, Runs Against Btrfs & EXT4, and EXT4 Still Leads Over Btrfs File-System On Linux 3.8. The file-systems being benchmarked in this article include EXT4, XFS, Btrfs, ReiserFS, and JFS. All file-systems were tested with their default mount options on the Linux 3.8 kernel.

The Western Digital Green WD5000AZRX was connected via its SATA 3.0 interface to an ASUS Crosshair V Formula motherboard with AMD FX-8350 "Vishera" processor. Ubuntu 13.04 was the Linux distribution in use while loading in the vanilla Linux 3.8 kernel.