Does Your SSD's File System Affect Performance?

Benchmark Results: PCMark 7

Synthetic benchmarks that spit out performance numbers for contrived workloads do not necessarily reflect real-life performance. To represent more realistic scenarios, we turn to PCMark 7. While PCMark 7 isn’t exactly a real-world suite, it is trace-based and does in fact reflect typical performance you would see in everyday operation.

Importing pictures to Windows Photo gallery means writing quite a bit of data. Appropriately, FAT32 isn’t the best foundation for this workload.

The overall score makes it clear that the differences in the real-world is much smaller than some of the more synthetic measures might suggest, regardless of whether you're comparing file systems or SSD architectures. However, FAT32 really is a bad choice on the Samsung 830, as seen in this example.

  • aznshinobi
    Those SSD drives.... *drool* Wish I could afford them.
    Reply
  • neon neophyte
    I remember the crossing from Fat32 to NTFS. It was significant even back then. Ever since I have craved a new file system offering to rekindle a fading memory of youth and joy. *sniff*
    Reply
  • I have a mac..
    Reply
  • hmp_goose

    Reply
  • aicom
    hmp_goose
    NTFS was heavily based on HPFS (when MS and IBM were both working on OS/2). It even shares the same MBR partition type code.
    Reply
  • confish21
    get article ty so much!
    Reply
  • billafu
    Enjoyed the article. Sadly, I am still unable to justify spending nearly a dollar per gigabyte for an SSD when HDDs are less than a dime per gig. Maybe when that price difference is a little bit closer.
    Reply
  • haplo602
    any other than windows/mac filesystems ? zfs ? btrfs ? ext3/4 ? jfs ? xfs ?
    Reply
  • lorfa
    Agree with haplo. Wanted to see ext4 at least.
    Reply
  • billafuEnjoyed the article. Sadly, I am still unable to justify spending nearly a dollar per gigabyte for an SSD when HDDs are less than a dime per gig. Maybe when that price difference is a little bit closer.120gb for a 120$ and HUGE performance increase and you still complain? How about you get a job.
    Reply