Filesystems
It’s time for Alexander Tolstoy to put the major Linux filesystems to the test and figure out which is best in terms of speed, reliability and extra features.
WE COMPARE TONS OF STUFF SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO!
ROUNDUP
Reiser5 Ext4 Btrfs XFS NTFS
is excited to discover which filesystem is the most robust and reliable of all.
HOW WE TESTED…
We gave extra attention to performance in this Roundup and conducted a series of tests to measure the filesystems’ capabilities. The hardware setup was built to handle four types of storage under a single Linux workstation. We went with the USB 3.1 Transcend Jetflash stick, Seagate Exos 7E2 hard drive (7,200rpm/ 128MB cache), Intel 530 Series SSD and Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus NVMe drive. We decided to conduct a synthetic test for measuring read speed using Postmark, which does a good job in stress-testing I/O using a large number of transactions, giving us figures for sequential reads. As for writing speed, we engaged Sysbench with its fileio mode to measure synchronous write rate on a series of 2GB files. Lastly, we tested the unpacking of the Linux kernel tarball, which was about 120MB and consisted of nearly 60,000 items –a typical example of real-world file operations. We also conducted a power outage imitation test to see how our contenders handle not being properly unmounted.