ESB: Ext2 Split Block Device

Solid State Disks (SSDs) start to replace rotating media (hard disks, HDD) in many areas, but are still not as cost efficient concerning capacity to completely replace them. One approach to use their superior performance properties is to use them as a cache for magnetic disks to speed up overall storage operations. In this paper, we present and evaluate a file system level optimization based on ext2. We split metadata and data and store the metadata on a SDD while the data remains on a common HDD. We evaluate our system with filebench under a file server, web server, and web proxy scenario and compare the results with flashcache. We find that many of the scenarios do not contain enough metadata operations to reasonably speed up IO performance.