Linux 4.2 Ubuntu 15.10 HDD Tests: XFS Leads Over EXT4, Btrfs

With recently having picked up four Western Digital Black HDDs, I decided to run some fresh hard drive benchmarks with the most common Linux file-systems to see how the performance compares atop Ubuntu 15.10.

Nearly all of the disk/file-system tests carried out on Phoronix are done using solid-state drives, but with having some new HDDs around, I decided to run some HDD file-system tests for those still using rotating media for storage. EXT4, XFS, and Btrfs were tested from a clean Ubuntu 15.10 installation and using the Wily Werewolf's default Linux 4.2.0-16-generic x86_64 kernel. All three file-systems were mounted with the default mount options during benchmarking.

The hard drive used for testing was the Western Digital Black 1TB HDD (WD1003FZEX). This 7200RPM HDD has a 64MB cache and their black series is backed by a five-year warranty. For what it's worth, this WD Black 1TB HDD can be found for about $80 USD.

The system was powered by an Intel Core i7 5960X Haswell-E with 16GB of system memory. All of these HDD Linux file-system tests were conducted via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.