Some weeks ago, I run a complete set of filesystem benchmarks on a DELL R510 server equipped with 12x 2 TB SATA disk and a low-end PERC H200 controller ( you can read more here: http://www.ilsistemista.net/index.php/linux-a-unix/13-ext4-vs-xfs-large-volumes-with-low-end-raid-controller.html ).
Now I am able to replicate the same set of benchmarks against a much more powerful PERC H700 storage controller, equipped with 1024 MB of non-volatile cache memory (it use DRAM memory backed up by a battery unit).
I would renew my thanks to the “Center for Research Computing” at University of Notre Dame, and especially to Paul Brenner, Serguei Fedorov and Rich Sudlow for allowing me to run some benchmarks of their newly purchased servers.
So, how EXT4 vs XFS perform on that high-end RAID controller? We well answer shortly, but before let me detail hardware and software setup used for this round of test.