XFS / EXT4 / Btrfs / F2FS / NILFS2 Performance On Linux 5.8

With the IOR write test, XFS was the fastest followed by F2FS and Btrfs.

But for IOR read tests, EXT4 had a strong advantage over the others.

Of 38 tests ran in total, NILFS2, F2FS, and XFS were all tied for the most wins followed by Btrfs and then EXT4 in last.

Having the most losses meanwhile was NILFS2 followed by EXT4.

When taking the geometric mean of all the test results, XFS was the fastest while F2FS delivered 95% the performance of XFS for this modern flash-optimized file-system. Btrfs came in a distant third place finish for performance from this single NVMe SSD drive benchmark followed by EXT4 and then NILFS2.

That's the latest data for the performance off a Seagate FireCuda 520 for those debating the merits of Btrfs as the potential default on the likes of the Fedora desktop. Of course, there is much more to file-system evaluation and selection besides just the raw performance.