Testing EXT4 & Btrfs On A Serial ATA 3.0 SSD

Switching over to a 8GB read with IOzone, the stock Btrfs file-system was about 13% faster than the EXT4 file-system. Zlib compression did help additionally, but the other mount options did not affect the large disk reads a great deal.

These test results comparing the EXT4 and Btrfs file-systems from the SATA 3.0 OCZ Vertex 3 SSD on an Intel P67 motherboard was not exactly what was anticipated. The default EXT4 file-system had outperformed the Btrfs file-system in many of the tests even though Btrfs in the past has been faster than EXT4 and that Btrfs does provide SSD optimizations. Interestingly, even when disabling these SSD optimizations via the nossd option, it seems that for these workloads there is no significant SSD optimizations taking place.

Meanwhile, using the spache_cache mount option continued to enhance the performance of the Btrfs file-system for many of the disk workloads. Additionally, using Zlib/LZO disk compression with the Btrfs file-system continues to be of great benefit.