Testing Out The SSD Mode In Btrfs

May 29, 2009, 21:04 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Michael Larabel)

[ Thanks to Cabal for this link. ]

"In Btrfs there the solid-state drive mode can be enabled by using the -o ssd mount option or adding ssd to the /etc/fstab. Enabling this option will tune the Btrfs allocator for SSD usage, which is then designed to improve performance with this file-system still undergoing development. However, unless disabling the write cache for the drive, the SSD mode does not necessarily mean better performance. In fact, as our results are about to show, the quantitative disk performance can drop greatly in the SSD mode when the write cache remains enabled. However, not all write caches can be easily disabled right now under Linux. With the OCZ Vertex SATA 2.0 SSD, which we used for this testing today, had its write caching always enabled. When attempting to disable the write cache through hdparm it would remain enabled regardless and when using sdparm it would report change_mode_page: failed setting page: Caching (SBC).

"The test system for this article included an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 clocked at 4.00GHz, an ASUS P5E64 WS Professional motherboard, 2GB of OCZ DDR3-1333MHz system memory, an OCZ 64GB Vertex (v1.10 firmware) Serial ATA 2.0 SSD, and a NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT graphics card. On the software side was Fedora 11 with all Rawhide updates as of the 28th of May, 2009. The kernel was Linux 2.6.29.4, GNOME 2.26.1 was the desktop, the X Server was 1.6.2 RC1, xf86-video-nouveau display driver, GCC 4.4.0, and at installation time through Anaconda we setup the drive to using Btrfs."

Complete Story

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