SSD’s, Journaling, and noatime/relatime
On occasion, you will see the advice that the ext3 file system is not suitable for Solid State Disks (SSD’s) due to the extra writes caused by journaling — and so Linux users using SSD’s should use ext2 instead. However, is this folk wisdom actually true? This weekend, I decided to measure exactly what the write overhead of journaling actually is in actual practice.
For this experiment I used ext4, since I recently added a feature to track the amount of writes to the file system over its lifetime (to better gauge the wear and tear on an SSD). Ext4 also has the advantage that (starting in 2.6.29), it can support operations with and without a journal, allowing me to do a controlled experiment where I could manipulate only that one variable. The test workload I chose was a simple one: Read more.
Hola! Looking for an answer to a question but did not find it? Then surf on over to the Questions & Answers section. It's a brand new addition to our site, and we are waiting just to answer your question(s).
Subscribe by email
Trackbacks