Windows 8 and its new file system

[Dos_Box]

The Register has just put up an article about the new file system that Server 8 and ultimately W8 will utilise, the Resilient File System (ReFS): Microsoft raises 'state of the art' son of NTFS ? The Register
You can also read more about this on the W8 blog here: Building the next generation file system for Windows: ReFS - Building Windows 8 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

[Ben-BSH]

"Never take the file system offline. Assume that in the event of corruptions, it is advantageous to isolate the fault while allowing access to the rest of the volume. This is done while salvaging the maximum amount of data possible, all done live."

Now that sounds good! if they can live up to what they claim, i think this is going to be awesome!

(the whole no GUI thing going on with Server 8 has got me excited too. I personally think its going to be a good move forward for sysadmins..)

[Arthur]

Helge Klein's blog has a great overview of the features ReFS does and doesn't support.

Functionality

• Allocate on write for metadata: new metadata is written to a different location. If the write fails, the existing metadata is still intact.
• Checksums protect all metadata.
• Integrity streams are optional checksums for file content. May be disabled for databases, for example.
• Scrubbing: On ReFS volumes residing on a mirrored Storage Space a system task periodically scrubs all metadata and Integrity Streams. Scrubbing involves reading all the redundant copies and validating their correctness using the ReFS checksums. If checksums mismatch, bad copies are fixed using good ones.
• Salvage is a feature that keeps the volume online and intact even if corrupt data is detected. In that case, only the corrupt data is removed from the namespace while the rest of the volume remains unaffected.

What Still Works

ReFS works with the following well-known file system technologies:

• BitLocker
• Access control lists
• USN journal
• Change notifications
• Symbolic links
• Junctions
• Mount points
• Reparse points
• Volume snapshots
• File IDs
• Oplocks

What Does Not

ReFS does not support the following well-known file system technologies:

• Named streams (this probably means Alternate Data Streams)
• Object IDs
• Short names (8.3 names)
• Compression
• EFS encryption
• User data transactions (this probably means the Transactional NTFS, TxF, introduced with Vista)
• Sparse files
• Hard links
• Extended Attributes
• Quotas

[sonofsanta]

ReFS does not support the following well-known file system technologies:
* Short names (8.3 names)

How can it not support 8.3? Are they changing the structure of file names completely? Is this simple restriction going to thoroughly break all Windows programs? I think I'm missing something here...

Removing quotas seems odd as well, although I suspect Storage Spaces might include that functionality.

[Arthur]

How can it not support 8.3?

When you think about it, there's not a lot of point in supporting 8.3 filenames on 64-bit OSs because they can't run 16-bit applications (DOS + Windows 3.1). You can also completely disable 8.3 filenames in earlier versions of Windows via a command-line program called fsutil...

fsutil behavior set disable8dot3 c: 1

The short 8.3 filenames are stored separately from the standard (long) filenames so disabling them shouldn't cause problems.

Removing quotas seems odd as well, although I suspect Storage Spaces might include that functionality.

I agree. The lack of quotas does seem strange (along with compression and hard-links). I imagine Microsoft will add these features back in future OSs though.

[Gatt]

MS have released an image showing the difference between NTFS and ReFS:

ntfs-and-refs.jpg

So basically - NTFS had a squiggly line, that now isn't in ReFS...
Glad they straightened it out for us!

[kevin_lane]

pmsl so will this sort out profile issues then haha