News Microsoft details Windows 8's ReFS file system

Bye bye, NTFS...

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2012/01/17/microsoft-refs-file-system/1

 

So they've copied some features from (the open source) ZFS, whilst getting rid of a couple of inferior features ZFS has done better (encryption and compression).

:| A step forward for those chained to the MS system, I s'pose, but not impressive.

 

Sounds like NTFS will still be the file system of choice for consumers for a long time to come then.

 

1. There is nothing wrong with NTFS
2. You can't boot off it, what's the point in it being resilient?
3. No Hard Links makes life harder for anyone with a small SSD Boot Drive
4. Only purpose I can see it having is as a backup drive (which can't be "removable")

Grrr Technology is driving me mad atm. If it's not this it's Intel's GPU's "supporting" DX11. Woop de frikin doo, I can now run better effects but at 3fps because I don't have the GPU grunt to use them.

 

So this is useful if I want to create a huge server/database running Windows 8? Why anyone would do that though...

 

It's debuting with Windows 8, not Windows 8 only.

 

Server 2008 & 2008 R2 are pretty code-synonymous with Vista and 7. No doubt Windows 8 will share it's base with Server 2012/whatever it's called.

 

Pointless.

 

Interesting I wonder if it will get a boot option at a later date for win 8. Dealing with very large volumes of millions of very small files along with hundreds of very massive files really has had me bumping into the limitations of NTSF for a year now. I am really looking forward to a new file system!

 

Hard links can only be made within a physical drive anyway; Symbolic links can be made across different physical drives and partitions so there's no real loss of functionality.

 

Absolutely ludicrous idea. Retaining NTFS for boot purposes and moving everything else to RFS. Whole bloody point of increased security should be booting from new RFS partitions. NTFS is really old and balancing on the edge of uselessness when dealing with really large amount of data. Why they didn't thought about retaining FAT for boot partitions when they introduced NTFS? Because it was utterly moronic idea then. And so is keeping NTFS as a enforced boot partition choice while all other data is running on RFS. Another ble$$ing from Macroco$t.

 

ahem....

phoronix [dot] com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA0NDA

its directly competing to btrfs, not as much of zfs. and even at that, its still missing features.

 

I welcome this. While it's still not as good as ZFS/BtrFS from the sound of this article, I for one am glad to see Windows get end-to-end checksumming on it's "data fs" - I've already had several GB of photos silently corrupt at some point (on a mechanical HDD) and would really rather it didn't happen again.

 

Microsoft said on the blog site that this file system is for Windows 8 SERVER edition, not home. "Home edition" is coming later on (probably once its bootable, and has features more relevant for home computers).

I know this article didn't make it clear, but that's the case.

 

You can make hard links to another partition, however they have to be to a folder, not to a file. They're actually called junctions, but they are still technically hard links. I use them so Windows is happy with it's default folder locations and yet I can have the multiple users on my system have all their pictures/music/videos in the same location but to the computer it looks like its in c:\users\<name>\...

 

But only on the same physical device. Symbolic links do the same job and are far more versatile.
It doesn't make sense to keep supporting Hard Links when Symbolic links can do the same and more.

 

Can't boot? What a stupid design.

 

can't boot YET.

 

I do not understand why they are holding it off maybe add it to win 8 ultimate but still I would love to have all the features early on. Besides it is not as though anyone is going to expect it to work perfectly until they have used it for a year without problems. I am so exited about this I almost want to have a launch party for it! I wish I could just use it for the boot drive and then I can run a test bed system on it for a year and then switch everything over if it looks good. I wish I could have it right now and start testing. Waiting a year or so is just way to long. Lets get off NTSF and move onto the future!!!!!

 

Servers have RAID backups, and separate backup. If anything... data is more than safe.
Most average users does not. Imagine if it fails... data loss, people go on the internet and complain like no tomorrow, turning Win8 into Vista.

Also, based on my understanding is that, in it's current form, it offers no real advantages to the consumer, plus it's not bootable. I would expect it to show on SP1 of Win8, and bootable, improved, set as default, on Win9.