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Microsoft Announces ReFS, a New Filesystem For Windows 8
bonch writes "Microsoft has shared details about its new filesystem called ReFS, which stands for Resilient File System. Codenamed 'Protogon,' ReFS will first appear as the storage system for Windows Server and later be offered to Windows clients. Microsoft plans to deprecate lesser-used NTFS features while maintaining 'a high degree of compatibility' for most uses. NTFS has been criticized in the past for its inelegant architecture."
How does it compare to ZFS in terms of resilience? After all, it's in the damn name.
Great. What does that mean for users?
Amateurs: Nothing at all.
"Know-a-bit's": Almost nothing.
Professional users: Nothing we couldn't do before.
State-of-the-art, top-dog, storage-gods: Nothing very special or new at all.
Now, if you'd said that it finally supported WinFS-style file tagging and searching, then you'd have ticked lots of boxes for all manner of users. As it is, it's a "slightly better filesystem than before" and hardly newsworthy (out of all your "features", I only spot one that you can't already do with Windows alone and that would ever be exposed to someone NOT using bit-level access to the drive - file level encryption).
I can't say that I've ever used any of the NTFS features they're planning to drop.
I do wish Windows had a sane soft-link system like *nix does; I've yet to run into an application that automatically dereferences a .lnk when opening it. You have to futz around with opening the link manually, reading it's redirect, and then opening THAT instead. Very crude and ugly.
But more to the point, I didn't see much about what might be NEW with this file system, only what's OLD and being discarded.
Mind you, some basic feature cleanup never hurt anyone. But if that's the case, why not NTFS2 instead of a marketing buzzword?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I'm not a filesystem guru. I stick to programming in the application space mostly. But I have noticed a large time discrepency compiling a large project using EXT4 vs NTFS. EXT4 being multiple times faster then doing the same compile on an NTFS. My question now is, will ReFS bring those times up to similar values?
PS. Also looking at the dropped support for short names, i think quite a few server batch files will be broken.
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I have to wonder how much of the pre-release ReFS hype will prove to be true in the coming years.
DavidSell, ByOhTek, antitithenai, Bonch, Dtech and others are psuedonyms/sockpuppets used by the Waggener Edstrom rapid response team employed by MS to astroturf discussions in favour of MS and to attack any point of view which isn't favourable to MS and supportive of their interests.
http://waggeneredstrom.com/about/approach
Mod accordingly
A few weeks ago, I pulled "Hail Mary" with regards to saving an SBS 2003 server. For whatever reason, the server would not boot after a power failure. The RAID cache was not dirty on the card, and the RAID volume passed a manual parity consistency check. Unfortunately, the server would still not boot into the OS. It kept throwing a BSOD or hung at finding the hal.dll file. Attempting to access the recovery console or other F8 invoked options failed. Any Server 2003 disk would throw a BSOD the moment it attempted to mount the boot "C" volume. It wasn't the RAID drivers, but actual NTFS corruption causing the kernel panic. Serious shit. However, a Server 2008 R2 disk did save my ass. I was able to mount the volume through a command recovery console. A chkdsk revealed massive amounts of corruption. Server is fucked right? NO! A "chkdsk /R" command was able to find and repair all errors. No data loss what-so-ever.
Basically, the server must have been busy with installing updates or something when the power died. An old UPS battery will do that. But this goes to show how remarkably resilient the NTFS system is. Absolute respect!
Life is not for the lazy.
I disagree on the 'paid' part. The posts are too incompetent. It seems more like a "I'll make MS look bad by posting this crap" type thing.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
It needs some way to securely mount a remote filesystem. SMB and non-anonymous FTP shouldn't be used over the internet ever. It wouldn't be too bad except that FTP is incredibly difficult to reliably tunnel due to it opening connections in both directions on random ports. I would be a happy person if Windows added native support for sftp.
You are confused. The only time I've bothered pointing out that the bonch account and Overly Critical Guy accounts are sockpuppet accounts was in this comment, after I read this comment blowing your cover. And since then I've also stumbled on this comment, which provides further evidence. Are you also going to claim that I am chrb?
And rest assure. I have some time to spare about now which I will waste replying to bonch/overly critical guy posts with messages pointing out that they are sockpuppet accounts. You can thank your personal attacks for this one.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.