Tom's Hardware Looks At WinFS

Alizarin Erythrosin writes "Tom's Hardware Guide has an article about the new WinFS file system. The article talks first about some of the problems and advantages with FAT[16|32] and NTFS, then talks briefly about WinFS. Here is the summary: 'Microsoft is breaking new ground with Longhorn, successor to XP. The upcoming WinFS file system will be the first to be context-dependent, and promises to make long search times and wasted memory a thing of the past. Today, THG compares it to FAT and NTFS.' Personally, I still have reservations about using a relational database to keep track of files. Unless they can keep the overhead to a minimum, I can't see it being as efficient as a file system should be."

Comments

This article is bullshit

[Zork the Almighty]

This article is bullshit. There isn't a shred of new information in it. It's like watching CNN.

Re:I really don't like this idea....

[ThunderRiver]

Heh..at lesat MS SQL is 100 times better than MySQL, which crashes all the time with PHP and I just can't deal with MySQL anymore!!!

Re:WinFS is on top of NTFS

[ADRA]

What a surprise, it is the microsoft indexer that "actually works"!

It is basically (from my point of view) a meta-data database that actaully points at the files instead of descriptors to files!! What a concept..

Realistically, if I am reading this right, it is JUST a further abstraction for 'beginners' and those that just don't care about computers or how they work. It has 0% usability / performance / availability gains by the looks of it. It is simply to make ignorant users navigation of the systems easier.

You need a tiny OS as a backup

[Wee]

Furthermore, will you have to have a full OS up and running to be able to query and get data out of the DB?

I'm not much of a hardware guy, but it seems like you could work this out if you had a small (50MB?) partition whose filesystem was something "known" and "simple" (FAT32? NTFS? FAT?) that lived on the boot disk. This partition could contain a boot image of a trimmed-down version of enough of the OS to just read that DB and mount/expose partitions where ever needed in order to go into "rescue" mode. I'm thinking of something like Linux's initrd preliminary root file system image for SCSI and such, with added stuff.

That would work well enough, especially if you had some bare-bones framebuffer GUI that let you view and fix partitions, use a USB mouse/keyboard, tools to move files in/out of ramdisks, etc. It could get the creature feep something fierce, but you could easily draw the line at like 100MB of compressed image data and still come away with enough tools to recover data. You could also stick all this on a bootable rescue CD (although I'd be pissed if I had to tote around a CD in order to recover from a crash).

-B

good stay away of GPL

[Billly Gates]

Aaahh! Music to my ears! Everyone should stay away from GPL software. Why? Because this type of software poses real liability problems for its users. Proprietary vendors can actively work to ensure their code is squared away legally so as to indemnify their customers â" because among other things, their code development is a lot more controlled. But GPL software distributors would find it just about impractical to audit all the code they distribute, and ensure that it does not violate any copyright, patent, or other forms of IP. This (and setting up a procedure to carefully check in code that is legally clean) would simply be too expensive an undertaking GPL software distributors. Even if SCO is not terribly successful in its legal effort, SCO has managed to bring great scrutiny to the robustness of GPL software to legal challenges. (This whole affair is so sad. So sad indeed.)

Re:other FSs are out there

[Alan Partridge]

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