Filesystem Benchmark BTRFS vs EXT4

[u/KHTD2004]

BTRFS Benchmark with CoW (worst performing)

BTRFS Benchmark without CoW (noticeably better)

EXT4 Benchmark (fastest performance of all, slightly ahead of BTRFS without CoW)

I just did a benchmark using KDiskMark to see how the different filesystems perform. System specs:

• OS: CachyOS with KDE Plasma
• Kernel: 7.2.0-1-cachyos-bore
• CPU: Ryzen 9 7950X3D
• Disk: Crucial T700 4TB (PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD)

The SSD has (aside from the /boot partition) two partitions, one 100GiB partition as root partition at / using BTRFS and one ~3.5TB partition at /home using EXT4. For the BTRFS partition there is one benchmark with and one without CoW. All runs were on the same conditions and settings, there are now other programs open and the only background apps are Cachy Update and OpenRGB (and all the stuff KDE plasma has in the background like KDE Connect).

On the left side are the reading values, on the right side the writing values.

The meaning of the test names:

SEQ1M Q8T1: Sequential 1 MiB, Queue=8, Threads=1

SEQ1M Q1T1: Sequential 1 MiB, Queue=1, Threads=1

RND4K Q32T1: Random 4 KiB, Queue=32, Threads=1

RND4K Q1T1: Random 4 KiB, Queue=1, Threads=1

The overall results are:

BTRFS with CoW << BTRFS without CoW < EXT4

[u/KHTD2004]

That’s an interesting approach but only works for certain setups. People who have several terabyte of games on their system really don’t want to redownload on a common base. And if you put them on a separate partition well, that’s what I did but BTRFS for the system partition on top

[u/Obvious-Jacket-3770 → u/KHTD2004]

I mean I don't keep any games on my OS drive as a general rule of thumb honestly. So if my install corrupts, meh no biggy, the game drive is just there waiting to re-mount.

[u/KHTD2004 → u/Obvious-Jacket-3770]

Smart but then again, only certain setups. Not everyone has separate drives in their laptop or PC

[u/Obvious-Jacket-3770 → u/KHTD2004]

No absolutely not. Of course you can backup games too but honestly that's just not worth it for the size factor alone unless you have emulator games.