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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."
After my initial tests, I must say that ReFS is incredible advangement. ReFS supports named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes and quotas. It is basically all the best filesystems compiled into one.
Not only is this good for Windows system, but overall network architecture.
This is a bad idea.
Now we can count on some guy named 'Hans Resilient" to be tried and found guilty of murder.
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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.
After my initial tests
Wait, what? From the article:
Officially named ReFS — for Resilient File System — the new file system will be made available via a staged “evolution,” according to a January 16 post on the “Building Windows 8 blog.
So you're saying something that was just announced and will be made available via a staged evolution has already been tested by you? Impressive!
It is basically all the best filesystems compiled into one.
Thanks for summing it up for me there, bud. I didn't realize it was the greatest goddamn filesystem I could imagine, why didn't you just say "Imagine what your dream filesystem will be able to do, this is it." I wonder though, will it have the homicide capacity of ReiserFS?
This reminds me of my initial tests of cold fusion. I must say that cold fusion is incredible dvangement. Cold fusion supports providing us with unlimited power from a glass of water, it prints money, it gives the user eternal life, it allows the user to travel faster than the speed of life and -- when activated -- attractive women jump out of the core reactor demanding money shot after money shot.
My work here is dung.
Today, NTFS is the most widely used, advanced, and feature rich file system in broad use.
If this is true...it's a very sad world we live in...
There's already no Linux driver for it... so does that mean you're going to switch? And if someone makes a Linux driver will you switch back to not using it?
If you're married to "Hans Resilient", you'll want to start running now.
Sounds like they're due for a refresh so they can get some new patents on their filesystem to make sure all the device makers need to continue to pay them money.
That might be motivation for creating ReFS. Third party NTFS drivers finally became mature enough to safely read/write the file system... so lets create a new undocumented filesystem and make data exchange between other OSes a PITA again. It also means WinFS is completely dead and never coming back.
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.
I'll agree.
As ugly as NTFS is, the one thing I've liked about it is that it's the only FS used by Windows and Windows Servers for a dozen years.
With Linux, on the other hand, I've had to deal with ext2, ResierFS, ext3, ext4, and those are only the popular ones! There are a ton of other specialized filesystems for other features, such as encryption or use on flash memory!
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"Microsoft plans to deprecate lesser-used features" --- such as the reasonable level of compatibility that has started to show up in non-Microsoft implementations of NTFS over the last couple of years. We may be assured that ReFS is a patent minefield.
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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.
All the file utilities for both Mac and PC and how you handle these different systems including forward/backward compatibility, Parallels, VMWare, Backup software, hard drives and tape devices will all go through teeth nashing debugs as we try to get everything to work with a new file system.
That may be OK when you are an IT professional.
For someone who "just wants it to work" there is likely to be lots of surprises ahead.
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.
Yes, you see that asterisk right next to his nickname that means "a subscriber account"... Oh, wait, there's none.
When it comes down to it, NTFS is a pretty good file system. If you look in to things you find that the feature list for BTRFS reads an awful like a feature set of current NTFS.
None of that is to say that NTFS couldn't stand improvement, and indeed it is being improved, but I've yet to see the amazing widely used file system that is so much better than it. Ext3 is functional, but leaves much to be desired.
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're reversing cause and effect. A volume isn't boot because it's C:\, it's assigned C:\ because it's boot. Behind the scenes the drive letters don't exist. It's an abstraction, in a similar way that sda, sdb, sdc are.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
... to not one.
The real world disagrees with your statement: we have TFS projects with long directory and file names, such that we cannot map the entire TFS source in a single folder. Even naming it e.g. "c:\x" (or "d:\", putting it on a separate drive), the paths and files still exceed MAX_PATH (which is 260, not 255).
So, this feature will be useful to our shop.
It's also useful for "rolling backups"; I administer family machines, and one has been upgraded from a desktop, to a laptop, to another laptop. The first upgrade, I copied all the files to "c:\e" (old machine was an eMachine). That laptop died, we used a restoration company that started with a "G" to get the data back (now we backup via WHS), and I saved that in "c:\g" (so there's a "c:\g\e" with the desktop's files). The third machine (second laptop) has "c:\h" (which also contains "c:\h\g\e"). Other times I've saved backups with more descriptive names, like "Backup of the Dell Inspiron 5150, 2011-11-11", and sometimes those backups fit inside each other like expressed above.
So, I have examples from both home and work where having longer-than-MAX_PATH file/path names would be useful.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
How much data did you have on a single large zdev that it required that amount of time? I tend to group mine into groups of 8 disks with raidz2. When I have to rebuild, it does so at the write speed of the new disk (100+MB/sec). If you have a relatively small array and it still takes 45 days to rebuild then you have a hardware issue, or you are using an siig card, which has horrible performance under all the unix/linux variants I have used.
I use zfs on linux at home with an 8 disk raidz2 array for network storage. On a core 2 duo / 2.5ghz using an lsi 1068 based card, I achieve a rebuild speed of 80+MB per second, a scrub speed of 150+MB/sec. At work, I use it to store spatial data / 3d video using zfs on linux. Multiple 8 disk raidz2 devices connected via lsi 9200 card. I achieve a rebuild speed of 80+MB per second, a scrub speed of 250+MB/sec.
If you use junk cards, you get junk performance.
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.