Optane SSD RAID Performance With ZFS On Linux, EXT4, XFS, Btrfs, F2FS

This round of benchmarking fun consisted of packing two Intel Optane 900p high-performance NVMe solid-state drives into a system for a fresh round of RAID Linux benchmarking atop the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel plus providing a fresh look at the ZFS On Linux 0.8.1 performance.

Two Intel Optane 900p 280GB SSDPED1D280GA PCIe SSDs were the focus of this round of Linux file-system benchmarking. EXT4, XFS, Btrfs, and F2FS were tested both on a single Optane SSD and then in RAID0 and RAID1 with two of these high performance drives. Additionally, ZFS On Linux 0.8.1 was tested on this system both with a single drive and in RAIDZ. For putting the Optane SSD performance in reference, there is also a standalone result provided of a Samsung 970 EVO 500GB NVMe SSD with EXT4. In case you missed out earlier Optane 900P benchmarks on Linux from 2017, see them here for this still very competitive SSD. While there are now the 905P SSDs, the 900P models remain available and cheaper hence why going for those when picking up two of them for this round of Linux RAID testing. All of the file-systems were tested using the Linux 5.2 Git kernel and running with their stock/default mount options. The EXT4/XFS/F2FS RAID was tested using Linux MD RAID while the Btrfs and ZFS RAID were using their file-system's native RAID capabilities.

These two Intel Optane 900p 280GB SSDs were installed within the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX test system on the ASUS ROG ZENITH EXTREME motherboard, 4 x 8GB DDR4-3200 Corsair memory, Radeon RX Vega 64, and running Ubuntu 19.04 with the manual upgrade to Linux 5.2 Git.

All of these Linux storage benchmarks were carried out using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. For those curious, next week are also some fresh Bcachefs benchmarks.