XFS RAID0 Benchmarks Across Twenty SSDs vs. EXT4 & Btrfs On Ubuntu Linux

Earlier this month were the FreeBSD ZFS vs. Linux EXT4/Btrfs RAID With Twenty SSDs. Besides interest in seeing ZOL tests (they're already planned upon the ZFS On Linux 0.8 release), there was also some interest by readers in seeing some XFS RAID tests side-by-side. Here are some of those XFS RAID benchmarks up against Btrfs and EXT4 from Ubuntu Linux.

With the tests today are XFS results alongside EXT4 and Btrfs for a single disk and then across twenty Samsung 860 EVO SSDs. With the tests earlier this month were also RAID10 benchmarks, but when testing XFS on the twenty SSDs in RAID10 I was hitting MD RAID errors that prevented the tests from completing. So for now it's just the single disk and 20 x SSD RAID0 benchmarks for those interested.

Tests were done on the Dell PowerEdge R7425 with the RAID array across the twenty Samsung 860 SATA 3.0 solid-state drives. See the earlier article for the other RAID levels and ZFS On FreeBSD while in 2019 will be the ZOL tests and other interesting tests sure to come off this very powerful 2P EPYC server.

XFS was beating out EXT4 in the SQLite benchmark both for the single disk and RAID0 setup.

Random 4K writes came in at about the same level as EXT4.

Sequential reads, however, were coming in slower.

Btrfs native RAID was much faster for sequential writes than EXT4/XFS on Linux Software RAID.

XFS was running the fastest with IOzone.


The CompileBench performance was mixed.

EXT4 led with RAID0 benchmarks when running the PostgreSQL server though the XFS tests had some higher variation to them.

Stay tuned to 2019 for a lot more interesting Linux benchmarks coming up.