FreeBSD ZFS vs. Linux EXT4/Btrfs RAID With Twenty SSDs

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.

FreeBSD 12.0 with ZFS and its default configuration was tested on a single disk, ZFS in a striped configuration with all twenty disks, FreeBSD ZFS in a RAIDZ1 configuration, FreeBSD in a RAIDZ3 configuration, and lastly FreeBSD ZFS in a RAID10 configuration.

When switching the Dell PowerEdge R7425 server over to Ubuntu 18.10 and upgrading to the Linux 4.20 kernel, Btrfs was tested on a single disk, in a RAID10 configuration, and in a RAID0 configuration. EXT4 using Linux Software RAID was benchmarked as well on a single disk, RAID10, and RAID0 across the twenty Samsung 860 EVO SSDs. The mount options used were the defaults as were other settings kept at their OS vendor defaults. ZFS Linux benchmarks will come when the upcoming ZOL 0.8 release is available.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite a variety of I/O storage benchmarks were run on this Dell PowerEdge R7425 server with dual EPYC 7601 processors and twenty Serial ATA 3.0 SSDs.