A Quick Look At EXT4 vs. ZFS Performance On Ubuntu 19.10 With An NVMe SSD

[deusexmachina]

I wonder if one could build a box like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0qtu5NXhuQ
That gets the same 5GBps that Linus demonstrated, but running ZFS! Would it still need hardware raid cards? If so, then which hardware raid cards for doing "software raid" like ZFS?

[MasterCATZ]

not to sure why you are bench-marking ext4 vs zfs with a single disk ? or why btrfs was not in the mix as its closer to zfs features

[S.Pam]

not to sure why you are bench-marking ext4 vs zfs with a single disk ? or why btrfs was not in the mix as its closer to zfs features

Even on single disks I choose to use to use Btrfs because of several reasons.
* checksums
* snapshots for easy backup and revision management
* compression
* easy and advanced volume management

Of course ZFS has similar/same features if you like ZFS better.

So it isn't exactly fair to benchmark these against ext4, xfs and the like if you need these more advanced features.

[mattlach]

Uh, this test demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what ZFS is, and what it is good at.

Why anyone would install ZFS on a single drive in any configuration is beyond me. What it excels at is redundant RAID-like configurations.

Any comparison between zfs and any other file system should be against hardware RAID or another software RAID configuration.

The right tools for the right job.

Oh, and let's stop talking about BTRFS like it is a viable option. BTRFS is dead. Red Hat deprecated it, it is losing support left and right, it is going nowhere. Dead as a doornail.

[cynic]

Uh, this test demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of what ZFS is, and what it is good at.

Why anyone would install ZFS on a single drive in any configuration is beyond me. What it excels at is redundant RAID-like configurations.

Any comparison between zfs and any other file system should be against hardware RAID or another software RAID configuration.

ZFS (and btrfs) can detect silent data corruption, even if it cannot fix it in a single drive configuration. If you care about your data integrity, this is quite a useful feature.

Oh, and let's stop talking about BTRFS like it is a viable option. BTRFS is dead. Red Hat deprecated it, it is losing support left and right, it is going nowhere. Dead as a doornail.

btrfs is very far from being dead. It is actively developed by, among the others, Oracle, SuSE and Facebook. Just take a look at the developer mailing list.
Redhat deprecating it on RHEL surely is not good, but it's not dramatic either.

[henrik]

For me, checksumming and bit rot protection in zfs or btrfs is of no value. They don't protect against accidental data modifictionby myself, or by a virus/malware or whatever. The only sane thing to do is to regularly compare differences in your dataset (which you care about) and manually decide if you need to restore from backup. There is a great little tool called "integrit" which can do this for you. With this, you can skip the advanced file systems and still get better protection for valuable data. This method is not fancy but sure a lot safer than trusting the file system to protect you from bad things happening ABOVE the file system layer...

[S.Pam]

Not a checksumming thing like with ZFS and Btrfs... do those scrub? I guess they must. How else to you prevent rot?

They verify checksums on each read. If there is a mismatch they will recover a good copy from dup or raid. Scrub simply detects faults before you need the files, especially when data is not in raid. That way you can use your backups. Scrub will also help you detect disks that are going bad and starts to corrupt data.

[guglovich]

phoronix Interesting test. I would like an update for 2022.