Benchmarking ZFS On FreeBSD vs. EXT4 & Btrfs On Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Benchmarking ZFS On FreeBSD vs. EXT4 & Btrfs On Linux

ZFS is often looked upon as an advanced, superior file-system and one of the strong points of the Solaris/OpenSolaris platform while most feel that only recently has Linux been able to catch-up on the file-system front with EXT4 and the still-experimental Btrfs. ZFS is copy-on-write, self-healing with 256-bit checksums, supports compression, online pool growth, scales much better than the UFS file-system commonly used on BSD operating systems, supports snapshots, supports deduplication, and the list goes on for the features of this file-system developed by Sun Microsystems. In this article we are seeing how well the performance of the ZFS file-system under PC-BSD/FreeBSD 8.1 stacks up to UFS (including UFS+J and UFS+S) and on the Linux side with EXT4 and Btrfs.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=15150

[joffe]

ZFS isn't only about performance. It's about file system integrity, redundancy, checksums and simple, reliable software RAID.

It is mentioned in the beginning and then quickly cast aside - could at least get a feature comparison matrix.

In any case btrfs' progress is impressive, hopefully it will reach the feature set level and maturity of ZFS at some point.

[kebabbert]

The only reason to use ZFS, is your data is safe with ZFS. With all other common filesystems, you data slowly but surely gets corrupted. And the filesystem does not even notice this. This silent corruption is really bad. The examples are numerous.

If you value a filesystem because of speed, then you have other priorities than Enterprise users (who value their data).

[karl]

I don't think ZFS was designed with this test in mind: one laptop hdd.
The test should be done with multiple hdd arrays (and maybe even mixed with some ssd).
Nevertheless, this test shows that ZFS is not such a good choice for a standard (one hdd) laptop/desktop system.

[kraftman]

ZFS isn't only about performance. It's about file system integrity, redundancy, checksums and simple, reliable software RAID.

The same about btrfs. Impressive numbers!

[Michael]

I don't think ZFS was designed with this test in mind: one laptop hdd.
The test should be done with multiple hdd arrays (and maybe even mixed with some ssd).
Nevertheless, this test shows that ZFS is not such a good choice for a standard (one hdd) laptop/desktop system.

Most desktop users though that get excited about hearing about ZFS + Linux possibilities are running such single drive setups though, so this testing is aimed at them (like most Phoronix articles towards desktop users), and not those enterprise installations.

[diegocg]

I don't think ZFS was designed with this test in mind: one laptop hdd.

While it's true that ZFS has been engineered with servers in mind, you can use the ZFS features even on a single disk (well, at least btrfs can)

[kebabbert]

The same about btrfs. Impressive numbers!

What?? Does BTRFS also provide complete data integrity just like ZFS does?? I didnt know that! I mean, comp sci researchers have shown in studies that the data protection in ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, ext3, etc is really bad.

But you claim the data protection in BTRFS is as good as ZFS? Where did you find that information, and where can I read more on this? Or, are you making this up?

[mether]

Hi

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Btrfs_in_Fedora_13

Yes. Btrfs does provide complete data integrity and not just metadata integrity by default. Aside from potential filesystem bugs, this is part of the design. Yum plugin in Fedora 13 already takes advance of the design.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SystemRollbackWithBtrfs

[d2kx]

Performance wise, btrfs destroyed the competition.