Storage Linux Reviews & Articles

There have been 191 Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles on Phoronix for storage. Separately, check out our news section for related product news.

With FreeBSD 12.0 running great on the Dell PowerEdge R7425 server with dual AMD EPYC 7601 processors, I couldn't resist using the twenty Samsung SSDs in that 2U server for running some fresh FreeBSD ZFS RAID benchmarks as well as some reference figures from Ubuntu Linux with the native Btrfs RAID capabilities and then using EXT4 atop MD-RAID.

Complementing the recent Linux 4.19 I/O scheduler benchmarks using SATA 3.0 SSD storage, here are some benchmarks when using the current Linux 4.20 development kernel and also using faster NVMe solid-state storage for benchmarking. Most Linux distributions default to no I/O scheduler in the case of NVMe SSDs, but for your viewing pleasure today is a look at the performance against MQ Deadline, Kyber, and BFQ.

Last week Corsair announced the Force Series MP510 M.2 PCIe NVMe solid-state drives as the company's fastest SSDs to date. While being Corsair's latest and fastest NVMe SSDs, the pricing is competitive with the 240GB model starting out at $70 USD, 480GB for $130 USD, $239 for 960GB, or $475 for a 1920GB version.

Last week I offered a look at the Btrfs RAID performance on 4 x Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSDs housed within the interesting MSI XPANDER-AERO. In this article are some EXT4 and XFS file-system benchmark results on the four-drive SSD RAID array by making use of the Linux MD RAID infrastructure compared to the previous Btrfs native-RAID benchmarks. Tests were done on the Linux 4.18 kernel to provide the latest stable look at the XFS/EXT4 MD RAID performance with these four powerful Samsung 970 EVO 250GB NVMe solid-state drives.

With the MSI MEG X399 CREATION that we received as part of the launch package for the Threadripper 2950X and Threadripper 2990WX it includes the XPANDER-AERO that provides 4-way M.2 NVMe SSD slots on a PCI Express x16 card. The XPANDER-AERO is actively cooled and could be passed off as a small form factor graphics card upon a very cursory examination. With this card I've been running tests on four Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSDs in RAID to offer stellar Linux I/O performance. Here are some initial benchmarks using Btrfs.

If you have held off on switching over to NVMe solid-state storage due to the associated costs, times are certainly changing. This week Intel introduced their 660p SSD series that yields 512GB of NVMe storage for $99 USD or 1TB for $200 USD.

Back in June Toshiba introduced the RC100 NVMe solid-state drive as a new low-end offering. The RC100 is now a bit blindsided by Intel's just-launched 660p SSD that delivers incredible storage capacities per dollar, and I'll have some Intel 660p Linux benchmarks in a few days, but for those curious about the RC100 here are some Ubuntu Linux benchmark results for this low-cost NVMe SSD.

It's been about three years since last carrying out any file-system performance benchmarks of Reiser4, but being curious how it stacks up against the current state of today's mainline Linux file-systems, here are some fresh performance tests of Reiser4 using the Linux 4.17 kernel. The Reiser4 performance was compared to Reiserfs, EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS.

A few weeks back I posted benchmarks of EXT4 fscrypt vs. eCryptfs vs. LUKS dm-crypt benchmarks for showing the EXT4 file-system performance encryption performance for these kernel-based approaches. That testing was done with a SATA 3.0 SSD while in this article is a look at the performance in another popular choice: if using a USB 3.0 external enclosure with a hard drive.

Given the recent advancements of the EXT4 file-system with its native file-system encryption support provided by the fscrypt framework, here are benchmarks comparing the performance of an EXT4 file-system with no encryption, fscrypt-based encryption, eCryptfs-based encryption, and a LUKS dm-crypt encrypted volume.

Last month Samsung introduced the 970 Series solid-state drives with the mainstream 970 EVO models and 970 PRO models for professionals/enthusiasts. The 970 Series moves to a 64-layer flash and uses a five-core Phoenix controller. For those curious about the Samsung 970 EVO performance under Linux, I have carried out some quick benchmarks to show off its potential under Ubuntu.

With Bcachefs on its trek towards the mainline Linux kernel, this week I conducted some benchmarks using the very latest Bcachefs file-system code and compared its performance to the mainline Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS file-system competitors on both rotating and solid-state storage.

With the Linux 4.17 kernel soon to be released, I've been running some fresh file-system and I/O scheduler tests -- among other benchmarks -- of this late stage kernel code. For your viewing pleasure today are tests of a high performance Intel Optane 900p NVMe SSD with different I/O scheduler options available with Linux 4.17.

With this week's release of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 this popular BSD operating system is promoting its own HAMMER2 file-system as stable. As a result, here are a few fresh benchmarks of HAMMER vs. HAMMER2 on DragonFlyBSD 5.2 while more tests are forthcoming.

Last month Intel launched the Optane SSD 800P series as a step below the ultra-fast Optane 900P solid-state drives but still a big step ahead of other SSD options like the Intel 760p series. Here are our first Linux performance benchmarks of the Optane 800p series with testing the 118GB SSDPEK1W120GA 800p SSD on Ubuntu.

Here are our latest Linux RAID benchmarks using the very new Linux 4.16 kernel while using two high-end Samsung 960 EVO 500GB NVMe solid-state drives with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Using MDADM Linux soft RAID were EXT4, F2FS, and XFS while Btrfs RAID0/RAID1 was also tested using that file-system's integrated/native RAID capabilities.

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.

If the extremely fast Intel Optane SSD 900p is out of your budget with its 3D XPoint memory, this week Intel rolled out the SSD 760p series with 64-layer TLC 3D NAND memory. For less than $100 USD you can get the 256GB capacity Intel 760p SSD, which is what we are benchmarking today under Ubuntu Linux.

The latest in our benchmarking with KPTI and Retpoline for Meltdown and Spectre mitigation is comparing the performance of the EXT4, XFS, Btrfs and F2FS file-systems with and without these features enabled while using the Linux 4.15 development kernel.

While solid-state drives have generally been quite reliable in recent years and even with all the benchmarking I put them through have had less than a handful fail out of dozens, whenever there's a bargain on NVMe SSDs, it's hard to resist. The speed of NVMe SSDs has generally been great and while it's not a key focus on Phoronix (and thus generally not receiving review samples of them), I upgrade some of the server room test systems when finding a deal. The latest is trying an ADATA XPG SX6000 NVMe SSD I managed to get for $49.99 USD.

Using the high-end SilverStone TS421S 4-disk SATA drive enclosure, I've been carrying out a number of Btrfs and EXT4 file-system multi-disk benchmarks over the past week. Here are the latest numbers for how Btrfs' native RAID capabilities are running up against EXT4 when using MDADM "soft" RAID.

With some BFQ performance fixes included as part of Linux 4.15 along with other I/O scheduler work and block improvements for this latest Linux kernel series, here are some fresh benchmarks of the different I/O scheduler options using the Linux 4.15 Git kernel.

Earlier this week I presented out initial Linux benchmarks of the Intel Optane 900P SSD with this 3D XPoint memory U.2 solid-state drive delivering incredible performance figures. Those tests were done with EXT4 while in this article are more tests with other mainline Linux file-systems and also testing some of the different mount options.

At the end of October Intel released the Optane 900P solid-state drive as their new ultra high-end performance SSD. Windows reviews have been positive, but what about using the Optane 900P on Linux? It's working well and delivers stunning NVMe SSD performance.

Of the many new features in Linux 4.14, one of the prominent additions is initial support for Zstd compression that is initially wired in for transparent file-system compression with SquashFS and Btrfs. Here are some benchmarks of Zstd Btrfs compression compared to the existing LZO and Zlib compression mount options.

It's been one year since last testing BCache as a means in the Linux kernel's block layer to allow an SSD to serve as a cache for a larger but slower rotational hard drive. So I have carried out some fresh benchmarks using the Linux 4.14 Git kernel to provide not only fresh benchmarks of BCache but also MDADM SSD RAID on Linux and some other fresh SSD/HDD benchmarks.

For boosting the I/O performance of the AMD EPYC 7601 Tyan server I decided to play around with a Linux RAID setup this weekend using two NVMe M.2 SSDs. This is our first time running some Linux RAID benchmarks of NVMe M.2 SSDs and for this comparison were tests of EXT4 and F2FS with MDADM soft RAID as well as with Btrfs using its built-in native RAID capabilities for some interesting weekend benchmarks.

Honoring another request of a Phoronix Premium supporter is looking at the performance impact of full-disk encryption using LUKS when using an AMD Ryzen processor. For this round of testing I used an AMD Ryzen 5 1400 running Fedora 26 and backed by an Intel 545s 512GB SATA 3.0 SSD.

Intel announced their 545s series SSD last month and it's been making plenty of rounds on Windows. Curious about the Linux performance, I picked up the Intel 545s 512GB SATA 3.0 SSD for benchmarking on Linux.

If you are looking for a low-cost NVMe M.2 SSD, the Toshiba XG3 is moderately priced and offers decent performance under Linux.