Does Your SSD's File System Affect Performance?
SSDs serve up data quickly, and prices are low enough that some enthusiasts may want SSDs for data storage. Does the file system you use matter? We compare performance between FAT32, NTFS, and the newer exFAT file systems on two popular SSD architectures.
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.
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