Linux 4.0 Hard Drive Comparison With EXT4 / Btrfs / XFS / NTFS / NILFS2 / ReiserFS

It's been a while since last running any Linux file-system tests on a hard drive considering all of the test systems around here are using solid-state storage and only a few systems commissioned in the Linux benchmarking test farm are using hard drives, but with Linux 4.0 around the corner, here's a six-way file-system comparison on Linux 4.0 with a HDD using EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and even NTFS, NILFS2, and ReiserFS.

I'll have out our usual file-system/kernel comparison out soon from an SSD in looking at Btrfs/XFS/EXT4/F2FS between Linux 3.19 and Linux 4.0 while today is just a comparison of six file-systems using a traditional HDD. The hard drive used for testing in this article was the Western Digital VelociRaptor. ZFS, Tux3, and Reiser4 weren't tested in this article due to their out-of-tree state.

All file-systems were freshly formatted and mounted with their default mount options and using their respective user-space utilities as packaged currently in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid. The Linux 4.0 Git kernel from 7 April was used for benchmarking. All the Linux file-system/disk tests were ushered by the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.