A Quick Look At EXT4 vs. ZFS Performance On Ubuntu 19.10 With An NVMe SSD

For those thinking of playing with Ubuntu 19.10's new experimental ZFS desktop install option in opting for using ZFS On Linux in place of EXT4 as the root file-system, here are some quick benchmarks looking at the out-of-the-box performance of ZFS/ZoL vs. EXT4 on Ubuntu 19.10 using a common NVMe solid-state drive.

Given Canonical has brought ZFS support to its Ubiquity desktop installer as an easy-to-deploy option for running on this popular file-system, for this initial round of testing from Ubuntu 19.10 a lone NVMe SSD is being used (Corsair Force MP600) as opposed to doing any multi-disk setups, etc, where ZFS is more common due to its rich feature set.

Clean installs of Ubuntu 19.10 were done both with EXT4 and ZFS while using the stock mount options / settings each time. The ZoL support in Ubuntu 19.10 is relying upon various back-ports from ZFS On Linux 0.8.2 and this imminent Linux distribution update is shipping with a 5.3-based kernel.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a small set of storage benchmarks were carried out while more are on the way from a diverse set of hardware components.