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Microsoft Announces ReFS, a New Filesystem For Windows 8

Posted by timothy on from the comes-with-striped-shirt dept.

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."

4 of 459 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting by msobkow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  2. NTFS up to EXT4 speeds? by Moses48 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. When NTFS was introduced... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 5, Interesting
    ... it was hyped, among other things, as a file system that would never need to be defragmented.

    .
    I have to wonder how much of the pre-release ReFS hype will prove to be true in the coming years.

  4. NTFS is resilient! by DigiShaman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.