Linux Gazette: Benchmarking Filesystems

“I recently purchased a Western Digital 250GB/8M/7200RPM drive
and wondered which journaling file system I should use. I currently
use ext2 on my other, smaller hard drives. Upon reboot or unclean
shutdown, e2fsck takes a while on drives only 40 and 60 gigabytes.
Therefore I knew using a journaling file system would be my best
bet. The question is: which is the best? In order to determine this
I used common operations that Linux users may perform on a regular
basis instead of using benchmark tools such as Bonnie or Iozone. I
wanted a ‘real life’ benchmark analysis. A quick analogy: Just
because the Ethernet-Over-Power-Lines may advertise 10mbps
(1.25MB/s), in real world tests, peak speed is only 5mbps
(625KB/s). This is why I chose to run my own tests versus using
hard drive benchmarking tools…”

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