Linked by malxau on Tue 17th Jan 2012 13:34 UTC
Along with Storage Spaces coming in Windows 8, ReFS forms the foundation of storage on Windows for the next decade or more. Key features of the two when used together include: metadata integrity with checksums; integrity streams providing optional user data integrity; allocate on write transactional model for robust disk updates; large volume, file and directory sizes; storage pooling and virtualization making file system creation and management easy; data striping for performance and redundancy for fault tolerance; disk scrubbing for protection against latent disk errors; resiliency to corruptions with "salvage" for maximum volume availability in all cases; and shared storage pools across machines for additional failure tolerance and load balancing.
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Member since:2011-03-18
Some of those are useful features, even if they are underused.
True. But didn't NTFS go through several iterations? Wikipedia says five versions:
The NTFS on-disk format has five released versions:
[ . . . ]
V1.0 and V1.1 (and newer) are incompatible: that is, volumes written by NT 3.5x cannot be read by NT 3.1 until an update on the NT 3.5x CD is applied to NT 3.1, which also adds FAT long file name support.[9] V1.2 supports compressed files, named streams, ACL-based security, etc.[2] V3.0 added disk quotas, encryption, sparse files, reparse points, update sequence number (USN) journaling, the $Extend folder and its files, and reorganized security descriptors so that multiple files which use the same security setting can share the same descriptor.[2] V3.1 expanded the Master File Table (MFT) entries with redundant MFT record number (useful for recovering damaged MFT files).
[ . . . ]
V1.0 and V1.1 (and newer) are incompatible: that is, volumes written by NT 3.5x cannot be read by NT 3.1 until an update on the NT 3.5x CD is applied to NT 3.1, which also adds FAT long file name support.[9] V1.2 supports compressed files, named streams, ACL-based security, etc.[2] V3.0 added disk quotas, encryption, sparse files, reparse points, update sequence number (USN) journaling, the $Extend folder and its files, and reorganized security descriptors so that multiple files which use the same security setting can share the same descriptor.[2] V3.1 expanded the Master File Table (MFT) entries with redundant MFT record number (useful for recovering damaged MFT files).
Nothing's stopping Microsoft from doing something similar again.
RE[2]: What Will Be Removed
by hechacker1 on Tue 17th Jan 2012 16:53
in reply to "RE: What Will Be Removed"
Member since:2005-08-01
That's my thought as well. As they implement ReFS onto the client (perhaps with Windows 9, perhaps with a service pack to Windows 8) they'll have to add important features that clients use.
For the server environment, the features they removed won't be missed considering Storage Pools and ReFS (with copy on write semantics) supersede them. Server 8 will have deduplication, which takes care of the need for Sparse files, hard links, and compression. It's probably needlessly complex to support all the dropped features considering the new file system and storage pool.
But for the client, Sparse files are critical because large files would take forever to allocate on typical HDDs. Hard links I'm not so sure about, because they are rarely used in Windows, but they are still nice to have for the client without dedup.
Finally, removing those other features is actually a good thing considering malware. Often all those obscure NTFS features are used to hide malware so deep in NTFS only specialized tools can find them.
Edited 2012-01-17 16:54 UTC
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Member since:
2007-08-20
FTA:
The NTFS features we have chosen to not support in ReFS are: named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes, and quotas.
Some of those are useful features, even if they are underused.