Mac OS X filesystem performance comparison

MacFixIt reader Jason Titus has completed a comprehensive set of benchmarking and analysis of how well the various filesystems perform on Mac OS X.

He used IOZone to benchmark HFS+ with and without journaling, HFS, UFS, and ext2 (using the alpha driver on SourceForge by Brian Bergstrand). Titus writes:

"Nothing too surprising, but I found it interesting that HFS+ was not that much better than some of the others. Ext2 seems like it has some potential to me - while it is much slower in small writes, it is faster in some reads, and hasn't even been optimized yet. Might turn out to be a good format for database and file serving drives."

Among the interesting points from the data (in comparison to standard HFS+):

• HFS+ with journaling: Slow on small writes (25-28% slower on 4k block writes).  Varied on larger block writes
• HFS: Mixed results.  Very similar to HFS+
• UFS: Much slower on writes (20-30% on most)

To view the full results, visit http://jason.tiltastech.com/performance/Mac_OS_X_Filesystem_Performance_Comparison.html.

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