Running The Flash-Friendly File-System On A Hard Drive? Benchmarks Of F2FS On An HDD

With the FIO benchmarks there wasn't a lot of difference on the rather slow SATA hard drive between the three tested file-systems.

Running FS-Mark on the F2FS-formatted WD HDD did yield the fastest performance and that was similarly the case with the SATA 3.0 SSD.

But when dealing with multiple concurrent FS-Mark benchmarks, the F2FS performance fell behind EXT4.

For BlogBench the F2FS performance on the HDD came out slightly ahead of XFS for a second place finish.

When running the PostgreSQL database server benchmark with reads and writes, the F2FS performance was actually way too high and almost matched the SATA 3.0 SSD performance, likely due to F2FS not syncing all of the data to the disk or similar behavior.

It was fun experimenting with F2FS on a hard drive for not having run such tests previously, but the data was far from convincing for making it worthwhile. Of course, with HDD SMR drives the performance may potentially be better, but still would be hard to justify it over EXT4 or XFS or even the likes of Btrfs and ZFS ZoL. If you are going to those extents to try to maximize your Linux system's storage performance, it may be time to consider switching to SSDs considering the falling prices.