Btrfs, EXT4 & ZFS On A Solid-State Drive

Starting with the simplest test of measuring the time needed to compress a 2GB sample file, there was not any benefit to using a solid-state drive with any of the three file-systems for such a simple task. The performance of Btrfs and EXT4 on Linux were close to the same, but PC-BSD 8.1 with ZFS on a basic pool took 2.8x times longer to Gzip the file.

With the initial create Compile Bench task, the ZFS file-system improved by 22% when upgrading to the OCZ Vertex 2 SSD compared to the Hitach HDD, the EXT4 file-system performance was 2.3x faster with the MLC SSD, but the Btrfs file-system performance was virtually unchanged between the HDD and SSD on this ThinkPad W510 notebook bearing a Core i7 processor. It is a pity that the SSD optimizations in the Btrfs file-system were nonexistent in this test while both EXT4 and ZFS had made sizable gains.

With IOzone carrying out 8GB worth of sequential writes, both EXT4 and Btrfs topped out at around 100MB/s with the Hitachi SATA HDD, but when moving to OCZ's new Vertex 2 drive both drives jumped up to around 275MB/s, which is right around where this MLC SandForce drive is rated.