I had no forbodings when NTFS replaced FAT, but this new ReFS puts me on
alert for problems. I confess I have nothing concrete, just a series
of uneasy feelings.
I am shocked that you cannot boot from ReFS, that means you
will have to mix and match NTFS on one partition and ReFS (optionally)
on the others. Sounds like a recipe for confusion to me.
(Microsoft say future versions of ReFS will be bootable.)
Why was WinFS cancelled, it seemed such a marvellous system?
That in itself makes me nervous, I would like to see the new system
running - preferably on someone elses machine for a year before I became
a convert.
Why only partial compatability with NTFS? For example. there
is no support in ReFS for disk quotas or removable media.
The main focus of new features is resilience, for example, automatically
correcting data errors. Verifying with checksum before the write commits,
and thus avoiding "torn writes"; it works by allocate-on-write, which never
updates metadata in-place, but rather writes it to a different area of the
disk, rather like "shadow paging".
Making sure that internal structures are pliable to support large
file system in the exabyte range.
Make it a rule never to take the file system offline. Instead
isolate the fault while keeping the rest of the volume available.
Impliment Storage Spaces for ReFS.
The graphic to the right shows how ReFS, uses some of the same code as
NTFS, namely file system read, write, open, close, and change notification.
But below this NTFS equivelent is a new architected engine that takes
care of the MFT (Master File Table).
Who Will Benefit Most From ReFS? ReFS will be most
useful on fileservers especially those with disk intensive applications that
require high-performance. Data storage companies who need even larger storage systems
that are currently available with NTFS may turn to ReFS.
Funny how history repeates iteslf, just as the FAT (File allocation
Table) system struggled against the need for partitions greater than 4GB,
and was superceded by NTFS; so the NTFS capacity of 16 TB is no longer
enough, and ReFS in Windows Server 2012 will allow 16 EB (Exabytes) in a single
file system
However, I cannot remember NTFS failing to support all the admitidly
limited features of FAT. It's an unwelcome sign of the times that
backwards compatibility is no longer the holy grail, as a result ReFS will
not support disk quotas and EFS encryption. Yet the most glaring
omission in the ReFS specification is the ability to boot, closely followed
by the fact that you cannot format removable media with ReFS.
I also hear that other features, which I have never used myself with NTFS
will also be missing: named streams, object IDs, short names, compression,
user data transactions, hard links and extended attributes. NTFS also
offered the ability to convert file systems from FAT, sadly this won't be
provided for transitioning from NTFS to ReFS.
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Summary of ReFS
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