Linux 3.13 Kernel HDD File-System Benchmarks

With the first FS-Mark run of 1,000 files of 1MB size each, there was no change in performance between the Linux 3.12 and 3.13 kernels for the three tested file-systems on the enterprise-grade Western Digital HDD. Between EXT4, XFS, and Btrfs, XFS was the fastest file-system on the 10,000 RPM HDD.

When expanding FS-Mark to cover 5,000 files of 1MB size and using four threads, the only change in performance between Linux 3.12 and 3.13 was the EXT4 performance being degraded by over 10%. While the EXT4 performance dropped for this particular run, it still delivered superior performance to XFS and Btrfs.

When dealing with 4,000 files and 32 sub-directories in our final FS-Mark run, the EXT4 performance regressed again on Linux 3.13 while the Btrfs and XFS performance maintained the same speed. XFS was the fastest file-system on Linux 3.13 for our HDD benchmarking.

With an IOzone 8GB write test using 64Kb blocks, the EXT4 performance improved on Linux 3.13 and put it more in line with the Btrfs performance levels. Btrfs delivered the fastest performance for this large write test on Ubuntu.