Linux 5.0 File-System Benchmarks: Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. XFS

[S.Pam]

I wouldn't care even if XFS/BtrFS/whatever were five times faster than ext4 cause it's the only filesystem which offers an extensive set of tools to restore data (including R-Studio Undelete). Yeah, I know about backups but sometimes people don't have them or they fail.

Well, with regular snapshots (I do on change, or every hour) you don't need undelete magic... So even if Btrfs is slower it enables much simpler work flows and easy restore. This I value. Besides, performance is usually way good enough these days ...

[Weasel]

Recovering data from an encrypted drive damaged or messed-up is almost impossible, I have much more personal experience of hard-drives broken than computers stolen, and between the two risks I prefer keep my hard-drivers unencrypted.

Exactly this. Not to mention you can have an unfortunate accident with amnesia and then you are screwed if it's encrypted.

[F.Ultra]

Crazy! This is one of those things you don't think can happen to you, until it does. What if someone steals your computer? You want them to have access to everything?! With modern CPU's encryption costs practically nothing, there is no reason not to do it.

I also run all my drive both at home and at work unencrypted. Every piece of sensitive data however is stored encrypted in e.g KeePassX and so on. There is no need to emply full disk encryption when the real sensitive data amounts to fractions of the data on the drives.

[DRanged]

Would have been nice if JFS was included as all the benchmarks are more than 10/15 years ago. I have been using it since 1998 one way or another. AIX/OS2/Linux.

[guglovich]

Phoronix: Linux 5.0 File-System Benchmarks: Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. F2FS vs. XFS

With all of the major file-systems seeing clean-up work during the Linux 4.21 merge window (now known as Linux 5.0 and particularly with F2FS seeing fixes as a result of it being picked up by Google for support on Pixel devices, I was curious to see how the current popular mainline file-system choices compare for performance. Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS were tested on a SATA 3.0 solid-state drive, USB SSD, and an NVMe SSD.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=27370

It would be better to do a normal resize to F2FS. I never learned how to change the size of this miracle.

[schmidtbag]

Crazy! This is one of those things you don't think can happen to you, until it does. What if someone steals your computer? You want them to have access to everything?! With modern CPU's encryption costs practically nothing, there is no reason not to do it.

Not in the slightest bit worried about anyone stealing any of my computers. Most of them have little to no valuable personal information at all, and the one that has the most incriminating stuff is waaaay too much of a hassle to attempt stealing. Granted, my laptop probably should have some level of encryption, but considering it doesn't even have a login prompt, clearly, security isn't a major priority to me (granted, I should care a little bit more about my laptop's security). But frankly, if someone stole my laptop, they'd be doing me a favor by pushing me to replace this piece of crap.

[edgmnt]

I also run all my drive both at home and at work unencrypted. Every piece of sensitive data however is stored encrypted in e.g KeePassX and so on. There is no need to emply full disk encryption when the real sensitive data amounts to fractions of the data on the drives.

And what happens when KeePassX fills in a password in Firefox and that gets swapped out to disk? Or if it crashes and ends up in a coredump?

[EarthMind]

Full disk encryption is no must imo, and I don't apply it anywhere, neither at work, because it opens up more potential issues and gives less user experience. Instead I create encrypted containers for specific data that is sensitive enough to store unencrypted and if possible only opened when necessary.

And for servers that run most of the time, there's generally more risk of a virtual attack that can get your data damaged or stolen than physically, fde doesn't hell with that at all.

Plus looking at benchmarks and having done several myself, even on modern cpus that performance drop is relevant, especially on hdds, and very much for specific workloads

Full disk encryption however is a must for mobile phones for me though. Those are devices that ALWAYS contain sensitive data, whether you realise it or not.

[starshipeleven]

It's weird how BTRFS performs so well on the NVMe and so bad when connected vie SATA. What's so different there?

Latency I guess.

USB 3.0 has bad latency, btrfs seems to also run worse on USB.

[starshipeleven]

Exactly this. Not to mention you can have an unfortunate accident with amnesia and then you are screwed if it's encrypted.

There is a thing called pen that you can use on another thing called paper, which will allow you to write down stuff.