The story revisited (2012)

The Linux Ext filesystem was definitely improved during the last couple of years.
The sequential write performance was improved a lot. I measure numbers around 2-300MB/s (Linux 2.6.32).

One small note: don't expect to see these numbers on a live system. In a real work environment (under light load) you'll see 30-70MB/sec sequential read and write performance. Random read and write will be even worse.

The original article:

Hardware config

• 3WARE 9650SE-8 RAID Firmware Version = FE9X 4.08.00.006
• 8 x WD SATA2GP 1.5TB WD15EADS 7200/32 HDD
• ASROCK A790GHH/128m
• 8G RAM
• CPU AMD AM3 PHENOMII 810 X4

Measurement results

Summary:

312 MB/s

269 MB/s

419 MB/s

320 - 340 MB/s

410 MB/s

Details:

Following the instructions found on this 3ware page...

Raw write

# sync; time `dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=1M count=20480 && sync`
20480+0 records in
20480+0 records out
21474836480 bytes (21 GB) copied, 68.929 seconds, 312 MB/s

real    1m18.373s
user    0m0.033s
sys     0m24.271s

Raw read

# sync; time `dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/null bs=1M count=20480 && sync`
20480+0 records in
20480+0 records out
21474836480 bytes (21 GB) copied, 51.2106 seconds, 419 MB/s

real    0m51.335s
user    0m0.017s
sys     0m15.656s

EXT3 write

# mke2fs -j -T largefile4 -b 4096 /dev/sda1
...
# sync; time `dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/pp bs=1M count=20480 && sync`
20480+0 records in
20480+0 records out
21474836480 bytes (21 GB) copied, 156.81 seconds, 137 MB/s

real    3m12.603s
user    0m0.049s
sys     0m36.227s

EXT3 read

# sync; time `dd if=/mnt/pp of=/dev/null bs=1M count=20480 && sync`
20480+0 records in
20480+0 records out
21474836480 bytes (21 GB) copied, 67.165 seconds, 320 MB/s

real    1m7.334s
user    0m0.016s
sys     0m12.980s

Different block size:

# sync; time `dd if=/mnt/pp of=/dev/null bs=4M count=20480 && sync`
5120+0 records in
5120+0 records out
21474836480 bytes (21 GB) copied, 63.088 seconds, 340 MB/s

real    1m3.222s
user    0m0.012s
sys     0m12.504s

XFS write

# sync; time `dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/pp bs=1M count=20480 && sync`
20480+0 records in
20480+0 records out
21474836480 bytes (21 GB) copied, 79.7094 seconds, 269 MB/s

real    1m29.821s
user    0m0.054s
sys     0m25.851s

XFS read

# sync; time `dd if=/mnt/pp of=/dev/null bs=1M count=20480 && sync`
20480+0 records in
20480+0 records out
21474836480 bytes (21 GB) copied, 52.4275 seconds, 410 MB/s

real    0m52.564s
user    0m0.024s
sys     0m11.487s