The 4 KB random write testing really serves as a poignant reminder of FAT32's age. Considering what we saw in AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark, the results don’t come as a surprise. It is obvious that the flexible cluster size of FAT32 at large drive capacities becomes an issue for write operations. The 4 KB chunks have to be accommodated into 32 KB clusters. exFAT does the job much better than FAT32, although it may also have large cluster sizes. Since its free clusters are indexed, however, finding one is a simple matter of looking up the corresponding bit in the bitmap.
Again, the results on sustained throughput resemble those seen in our earlier tests, and there are really no surprises there.
Summary
- What's A File System? Does It Matter?
- File Systems: FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, and HFS+
- Test SSDs: Samsung 830 And Zalman F1 Series
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- AS SSD: Random And Sequential Throughput
- AS SSD: Access Time, Copy Benchmark, And Overall Score
- CrystalDiskMark: Random And Sequential Throughput
- Benchmark Results: Iometer 4 KB Random And Streaming Read/Write
- Benchmark Results: Iometer Workload Tests
- Benchmark Results: PCMark 7
- Stick To NTFS On Windows
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