Linux 5.4 EXT4 / XFS / Btrfs RAID Performance On Four HDDs

Recently a Phoronix reader inquired about seeing some fresh hard drive RAID benchmarks on the current kernel release and using Btrfs / EXT4 / XFS. While we don't often look at HDD RAID performance these days compared to speedier SSD testing, since the reader was a generous Phoronix Premium member I was happy to oblige to his test request. Here is a look at the Linux 5.4 HDD RAID performance per his request with Btrfs, EXT4, and XFS while using consumer HDDs and an AMD Ryzen APU setup that could work out for a NAS type low-power system for anyone else that may be interested.

The four hard drives used for testing were 6TB Seagate IronWolf NAS (ST6000VN0033-2EE) hard drives and the system was an AMD Ryzen 5 3400G setup with 16GB of RAM. Ubuntu with the Linux 5.4 Git kernel of the time was running on this AMD NAS type setup running within the SilverStone CS381.

All three Linux file-systems were tested with their default mount options and other defaults (including I/O scheduler defaults in each configuration). The RAID configurations tested were RAID0, RAID10, and RAID1 across the four Seagate IronWolf drives plus a "single" configuration outside of RAID. MD RAID was used while for Btrfs RAID testing its own built-in RAID capabilities were utilized. Via the Phoronix Test Suite various storage benchmarks were conducted.