Linux 4.16 File-System HDD & SSD Tests With EXT4/F2FS/Btrfs/XFS

With the Linux 4.16 kernel release expected in just a matter of days, here are some fresh file-system benchmarks on this near-final kernel using a solid-state drive and hard drive while testing out the popular mainline file-system choices of Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS.

This round of reference benchmarks provides a look at how these four leading mainline Linux file-system choices are comparing on a consumer-grade HDD and SSD. Coming in the days ahead are also some fresh NVMe SSD tests using the Linux 4.16 kernel, including when pairing two Samsung 960 EVO 500GB NVMe SSDs in RAID0/RAID1.

The SSD used for this round of testing was the Toshiba/OCZ Trion TR-150 120GB SATA 3.0 solid-state drive. This driver advertised sequential reads up to 550MB/s and writes up to 530MB/s while for random reads delivering up to 87k IOPS and random writes up to 83k IOPS.

The hard drive used for this reference file-system testing on Linux 4.16 was the Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM006-2DM1 2TB 7200RPM SATA 3.0 HDD with 64MB cache.

All of this testing was done within a Tyan S7106 1U Xeon Scalable server with dual Xeon Gold 6138 CPUs. Ubuntu 18.04 daily was the base operating system but with upgrading to the Linux 4.16 Git kernel as of 23 March. Each time the file-systems were freshly formatted and mounted with their default mount options. The CFQ I/O scheduler was used throughout all of this SSD/HDD benchmarking on Ubuntu Linux. All of the I/O disk benchmarks were facilitated using the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.