Linux 4.0 Hard Drive Comparison With EXT4 / Btrfs / XFS / NTFS / NILFS2 / ReiserFS

First up is FIO, the Flexible I/O Tester.

XFS by far was the fastest for the random write test followed by EXT4 and ReiserFS. Btrfs was the second-slowest, only beating out the FUSE-based NTFS.

When increasing the block size from 4KB to 128KB, the results were much closer and here Btrfs was then able to lead while the XFS file-system failed to run FIO in this configuration.

With random reads the fastest was NTFS, albeit its results are too high for what could be achieved by this SATA 3.0 hard drive. The NTFS file-system is FUSE-based and obviously would be more recommended to use a native Linux file-system as long as you don't need to share files with any Windows/OSX systems.

The sequential read results were close except for NILFS2 falling behind the rest.

EXT4 was the leader in sequential writes followed by Btrfs.