On Benchmarking Popular File Systems

In recent years, Windows, Linux and BSD have become dominant operating systems in personal computers [1]. An essential component of the operating system is its file system. Although there are reports [2, 3] on evaluation of file systems under the same operating system, it is necessary to assess the performance of different file systems under their associated operating systems to help selecting the operating system for different application requirements. In this paper, we evaluate six most commonly used file systems, NTFS, FAT32, Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS, and UFS, in their respective operating systems. We compare their I/O performance under different workloads. Our results show that file system performance is largely tied to the cache and memory buffer management of the underlying operating system. Windows seems to support better buffering for random access of large files than Linux, but Linux based file systems offer faster sequential read/write performance. Journaling file systems trade some write speed for improved reliability. UFS performs consistently well for all I/O operations under any file sizes.