Running The Flash-Friendly File-System On A Hard Drive? Benchmarks Of F2FS On An HDD

While I have benchmarked the F2FS file-system a lot since it was mainlined back in 2013, it's all been on solid-state drives or even other forms of flash storage like USB drives. After all, F2FS is short for the Flash-Friendly File-System. But a Phoronix reader recently suggested that F2FS also works out well for traditional, rotating hard drives so I decided to run some benchmarks.

A Phoronix reader recently suggested on Twitter that F2FS works out well for hard drives, particularly shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drives. While I don't have any SMR drives around, I decided to run some benchmarks with a Western Digital VelociRaptor 150GB WD1500HLHX-0 hard drive. With this Western Digital HDD I tested on the common EXT4 and XFS file-systems before proceeding to test F2FS on this 10,000 RPM hard drive. Each file-system was tested with its default mount options while all tests were done from an Ubuntu 18.10 box running the Linux 5.0 Git kernel.

Besides the XFS/EXT4/F2FS tests on the Western Digital hard drive, I also repeated the tests on a Samsung 860 QVO 1TB SATA 3.0 SSD for some reference data of the relative F2FS vs. EXT4 vs. XFS performance there for flash storage where this file-system is designed. All these benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.