Block device vs files

[jacksenk]

• I’ve got a VPS with an SSD file system.
• I am unable to attach external block devices to it.
• Currently I use the file method for storage

Am I able to use a partition as a ‘block storage device?’ If so, am I better off using a partition or file based?

[kporter]

Yes you can use a partition and we would recommend that over files for the reasons discussed here:

Using filesystem to have better caching via VFS

TLDR; We found file system to be really bad when the system is running low on memory Details… We actually experimented for the same reason - to see if we can get free read-cache. We tested in the past comparing raw SSD, ext3 and ext4 filesystems. While ext3 was a bit poor than raw SSD, ext4 was better than raw SSD (a bit inconsistent but better). But the fun ends there! While the short-term benchmarks show everything in good light, there were some really bad nightmares when our customers used …