Btrfs, EXT4 & ZFS On A Solid-State Drive

With the benchmarks recently looking at the performance of ZFS on FreeBSD versus EXT4/Btrfs on Linux having generated much interest and a very long discussion, this morning we are back with more benchmarks when running ZFS on FreeBSD/PC-BSD 8.1 and Btrfs and EXT4 on an Ubuntu Linux 10.10 snapshot with the most recent kernel, but this time the disk benchmarking is being done atop a high-performance solid-state drive courtesy of OCZ Technology and the CPU is an Intel Core i7. The drive being tested across these three leading file-systems is the OCZ Vertex 2 that promises maximum reads up to 285MB/s, maximum writes up to 275MB/s, and sustained writes up to 250MB/s.

The testing is similar to the previous ZFS/Btrfs/EXT4 article, but this time around, the testing is being done on a faster system and one boasting an SSD. However, to satisfy those interested in seeing any relative performance changes to an HDD, we also included the results from a 320GB Hitachi HTS72503 SATA 2.0 HDD that spins at 7200RPMs. Like other recent Phoronix articles, this testing is being done atop a new Lenovo ThinkPad W510 notebook with an Intel Core i7 720QM quad-core CPU, there's 4GB of system memory, and a NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics processor. With the ZFS file-system testing was a stock PC-BSD 8.1 x86_64 installation with KDE 4.4.5, X.Org Server 1.7.5, and GCC 4.2.1 base. For both EXT4 and Btrfs was an Ubuntu 10.10 snapshot with the Linux 2.6.35 x86_64 kernel, GNOME 2.30.2, X.Org Server 1.8.2 RC2, GCC 4.4.5, and the respective file-system being tested using a clean install from the Ubuntu Maverick alternate install CD (since the normal LiveCD doesn't offer Btrfs install support). All file-systems and operating systems were left with their stock settings. In another article we will have the results with the Btrfs results when its zlib compression technology was enabled. The Btrfs file-system on recent kernel releases automatically enables solid-state drive optimizations when it detects its running atop an SSD.

The Phoronix Test Suite benchmarks used had included Gzip compression, Compile Bench, IOzone, Dbench, FS-Mark, Flexible I/O Tester, Threaded I/O Tester, and PostMark. However, not all of these test profiles are compatible with PC-BSD/FreeBSD so some of them just contain the SSD/HDD results for Btrfs and EXT4.