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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."

15 of 459 comments (clear)

  1. My preview of ReFS by TechGuys · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:My preview of ReFS by DarkOx · · Score: 5, Informative

      That's very interesting given the article says

      There are some NTFS features for which Microsoft plans to drop support with ReFS, specifically named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes, and quotas, Verma blogged. That said, one of Microsoftâ(TM)s goals with ReFS is to âoemaintain a high degree of compatibility with a subset of NTFS features that are widely adopted while deprecating others that provide limited value at the cost of system complexity and footprint,â Verma said.

      --
      Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
    2. Re:My preview of ReFS by vlm · · Score: 5, Funny

      End users: We still live in a world of 8.3 filenames. Sorry. Till the last PC is burned in a bonfire...

      You know what would be a funny graph of google data? How many are still serving up .htm files instead of .html files vs year.

      20 years from now my grandkids are going to have to answer on Jeopardy why computer filenames are still in a 8.3 filename format.

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    3. Re:My preview of ReFS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Or maybe, just maybe, his post is actually a joke, wherein he copy/pasted the list of features being dropped (see paragraph 5 in TFA), claiming they were the advancements.

      But no, conspiracy theories are much more fun.

    4. Re:My preview of ReFS by reasterling · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I use linux (arch linux) on all my machines. I agree with you that this will break interoperability, but even I (a die hard linux user) recognize that Microsoft has a right to try to improve their file system. NTFS has been around a long time (version 1.0 released in 1993). Sometimes laying an old project to rest and starting new is the right choice. This does not mean that they are doing this to break "system rescue cd" or some other live linux environment.

      --
      "For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice" -- God
  2. Starts with 'R' by uigrad_2000 · · Score: 5, Funny

    This is a bad idea.

    Now we can count on some guy named 'Hans Resilient" to be tried and found guilty of murder.

    --
    Free unix account: freeshell.org
  3. You gotta be kidding me?! by Robert+Zenz · · Score: 5, Funny
    From the blog post:

    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...

  4. Re:Interesting by EvanED · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    Man, if only.

    (OK, it's not quite sane considering you have to distinguish between links to files and links to directories at creation time. I'm not sure what happens if you flip it behind its back.)

  5. Re:linux driver by SJHillman · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

  6. Warning by TBedsaul · · Score: 5, Funny

    If you're married to "Hans Resilient", you'll want to start running now.

  7. More things to patent.... by Sir_Sri · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  8. Re:linux driver by NJRoadfan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  9. Re:Interesting by anonymov · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's a blog post linked from the article.

    There's all kinds of promising stuff, like data corruption resilience and dropped/extended limits.

    Much more interesting read than the linked ZDNet article.

  10. 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.

  11. Re:NTFS is resilient! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Respect?? That's absolutely terrible.

    A modern journalling filesystem should not experience any corruption after a crash, because journal recovery is supposed to keep data structures consistent.

    Not only that, but NO filesystem, journalling or not, should cause a kernel crash if it is corrupted.

    Microsoft has done one thing well, and that is to lower the expectations of their users so far, that what should have been a few second journal recovery turned into a big outage and manual recovery of a massively corrupted filesystem, and that gains them "Absolute respect".