Filesystems - ext4 vs XFS on multimedia HDDs

Question

Hi,
I was wondering how does XFS perform in the long run compared to ext4 on strictly multimedia storage hard drivers - where no file is less than 500mb.
I read some benchmarks, and all these tests show XFS in various situations - but I am unable to determine how would this reflect on usage in practice - e.g. one of most important things for me is copying <from> and <to> the hard drive.
I ran some quick benchmarks on my own:
Copying 232.6mb:
XFS - 70mb/s write, 45mb/s read
EXT4 - 69mb/s write, 48mb/s read
JFS - 60mb/s write (little behind), 50mb/s read
So, my question is, is it worth it to run all my multimedia storage partitions on XFS or should I just stick to ext4 since it seems just as fast (at least by my estimate), and is relatively newer and more maintained?

Answer 1

If someone's interested... I tested XFS and ext4 on fastest hard drive I currently have, and tweaked the mount settings on both filesystems. The both partitions are on the same hard drive as shown:
/dev/sda2 ext4 40G 24G 14G 64% /home
/dev/sda4 xfs 172G 733M 172G 1% /media/ST3250410AS
The fstab tweaks are noatime,nobarrier for both, and logbufs=8 for XFS:
/dev/sda2 /home ext4 defaults,noatime,nobarrier 0 1
/dev/sda4 /media/ST3250410AS xfs defaults,noatime,nobarrier,logbufs=8 0 0
At these settings write speed is (copied FROM the same hard drive to sda2/sda4):
ext4 - 70.77mb/s
XFS - 96.92mb/s
Read speed is (copied TO the same hard drive from sda2/sda4):
ext4 - 73.72mb/s
XFS - 83.43mb/s
So in terms of pure read/write speed, XFS still wins when tweaked...
Last edited by karabaja4 (2010-12-27 21:11:57)