USB Flash Drive File-System Tests On Fedora

Written by Michael Larabel in Storage on 29 December 2014 at 02:30 AM EST. Page 1 of 4. 22 Comments.

For those wondering what Linux file-system is most performant on a USB 3.0 flash drive, here are some benchmarks using Fedora 21.

As some more end-of-year Linux benchmarks, curiosity got the best of me what modern file-system was running the fastest on a USB 3.0 flash drive -- in terms of greatest performance but not necessarily the best for reliability or longevity. With having a new Lexar JumpDrive S73 64GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive LJDS73-64GASBNA in the office, I ran some simple tests on Fedora 21 with the Linux 3.17.6 kernel.

With a clean installation of Fedora 21 on an Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3 system, I ran file-system tests of Btrfs, XFS, EXT3, and EXT4 file-systems as some native Linux file-systems available with Fedora 21's kernel. Sadly missing from the mix is F2FS due to Fedora's decision (and wishing to keep this comparison to an out-of-the-box representation on F21) but that will hopefully change in the future. The exFAT file-system was also left out as it's not officially supported by Fedora. FAT32 was left out since some of the used benchmarks will not run on the file-system.

The Lexar JumpDrive S73 64GB USB 3.0 Flash Drive advertises reads up to 100MB/s and 55MB/s writes. This is a fairly nice USB 3.0 64GB flash drive for the price that sells for just $20 USD on Amazon.com. The tests were done using the stock mount options of each file-system on Fedora 21. The various Linux disk benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.


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