Saturday, January 26, 2013

Linux filesystem overhead comparison

I needed some temporary data storage for a few days for a migration project, so I wanted to know which filesystem to use, that would give me the most available space.
I'm not considering security, journals or anything here, I just need the maximum amount of space possible. Tests were done on a 2TB SAS disk in a Dell MD1000 array, configured as a one disk RAID0 on a PERC5e controller. The tested ones are the most basic Linux compatible filesystems, by no means is this test academic or universal. The results did surprise me a bit:


I expected FAT to be among the top ones, as it's not a very sophisticated fs, and didn't expect much from ext2/3. I'm also a bit biased towards XFS, so I kind of expected better results.
Tests were done with default mkfs.* settings, only exception is root reserved blocks on ext2/3, which were set to 0. The above output is from df -m. I didn't always pay attention in Operating systems class, so the results of minix surprised me a bit.


I have a sort of love-hate relationship with reiserfs, but for today, it earned itself a job.