The upcoming Windows 8 from Microsoft is bringing few drastic changes, and one of the recently detailed feature is the ReFS. It’s the new file system that is set to replace NTFS that was introduced with Windows XP. Earlier, Microsoft planned winFS as upgrade to NTFS but they heldback due to few niggling issues of incompability.
The features that ReFS will bring are as follows:
- Metadata integrity with checksums
- Integrity streams providing optional user data integrity
- Allocate on write transactional model for robust disk updates (also known as copy on write)
- Large volume, file and directory sizes
- Storage pooling and virtualization makes file system creation and management easy
- Data striping for performance (bandwidth can be managed) 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
- Shared storage pools across machines for additional failure tolerance and load balancing
NTFS features no longer supported are:
- Named streams
- object IDs
- Short names
- Compression
- File level encryption (EFS)
- User data transactions
- Sparse, hard-links, extended attributes
- Quotas
The ReFS file system will support characters upto 32,000 as opposed to just 256 in NTFS. It won’t be supported by Windows 7 due to the manner in which the OS has been guidelined. As the new file system won’t be supported in other existing OS, conversion can’t take place between NTFS and ReFS. You cannot currently boot from ReFS to other file system, doesn’t matter if its NTFS or any other linux file system. The “upper layer” API of ReFS is the same as NTFS and the differences lie in the actual storage engine. With ReFS, file-system repair utilities can run online.
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