EXT4, Btrfs, XFS & NILFS2 HDD File-System Tests On Linux 4.8

Written by Michael Larabel in Storage on 24 August 2016 at 12:03 PM EDT. Page 1 of 3. 7 Comments.

Up until running the tests for today's article, I can't remember the last time I touched a hard drive... It's been many months ago at least. Nearly all of our tests at Phoronix are from solid state storage, but I decided to pick up a new HDD for running some Linux file-system tests on a conventional hard drive for those not having an SSD.

Via NewEgg.com I saw a good deal on a refurbished Hitachi Ultrastar HUA72302 "Enterprise" Hard Drive with 2TB of storage, 7200 RPM, 64MB cache, Serial ATA 3.0, and backed by HGST with a five-year warranty. For just over $30 USD it was a deal and decided to order it for running some modern Linux HDD file-system tests for curiosity sake.

The file-systems I tested on Linux 4.8 with this Hitachi SATA 3.0 HDD were Btrfs, EXT4, XFS, and NILFS2 as the interesting mainline file-systems to test with a single disk. I did attempt testing with ZFS On Linux, but the ZFS 0.6.5.7 release wasn't building cleanly against the Linux 4.8 Git code.

All four hard drives were tested with their default mount options from Linux 4.8 (18 August Git) on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS x86_64. Well, let's look at these numbers if you care at all about HDD performance.


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