Testing The BCache SSD Cache For HDDs On Linux 4.8
For a single-threaded FS-Mark run, using BCache with its writeback mode actually put this HDD+SSD combination faster than the OCZ Trion TR150 and Intel SSDSC2BW12 devices but still slower than the higher-end SSDs.
However, when dealing with multiple threads of FS-Mark the BCache writeback results were only faster than the Hitachi HDD itself and the OCZ Trion TR150.
BCache wasn't of much use with the PostgreSQL database server benchmark. That's it for these quick BCache Linux 4.8 tests. If there is interest in seeing more data points, let me know, premium members. If you are shopping for affordable, fast NVMe SSD storage, see the recent benchmarks of the Intel 600P NVMe M.2 SSD on Linux.
Well, that's it for the latest BCache testing from the Linux 4.8 Git kernel with a Hitachi 7200RPM SATA 3.0 HDD and a Samsung 850 EVO 120GB SSD as the cache. For some of the workloads the performance was respectable (like single-threaded FS-Mark in particular) while in other workloads it was much less beneficial. At least BCache on Linux 4.8 was much more performant than the last time I did BCache testing in 2015 when the performance was much worse. It will also be interesting to see what comes of the related BCachefs file-system project.
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