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back to article Microsoft raises 'state of the art' son of NTFS

Microsoft has unveiled a "state of the art" file system for the next 10 years that builds on NTFS. Named Resilient File System (ReFS), Microsoft's latest baby will be delivered with Windows 8 Server and become the foundation of storage on Windows Clients. ReFS will be used with Windows 8's Storage Spaces, a feature in …

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  1. Jean-Luc
    Windows

    Is it just me?

    Or are others also annoyed at all this bloggy Microsoft Win8 self-promotion that the Reg is passing on? At least, if you are going to do this, qualify it with some reality checks about past Microsoft promises in such areas as spiffy file systems, fast boots, getting rid of the registry, etc...

    New Windows versions, whatever their qualities, almost never end up living up to their hype. This isn't about ext4 or an equivalent feature in system xyz being better, it's about keeping Windows expectations realistic.

    Win 8 magically has storage spaces, brilliant update mechanisms, now a better-than-anything else FS. Is there a beta preview of this? Show us the money!

    I think we need a new term for all this: blogware.

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  2. a_mu

    why

    why another file system,

    are there not some perfectly good ones around, open source even ?

    come on MS, you support ish open file formats , so why not file systems,

    come on governments , you need to sort this out too.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Err...

      It's surely the OSS community's job to support their filesystems on Windows, rather than MS' job to support their filesystems?

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Shurely.

        So it'd be redmond's job to support NTFS on non-windows then? If not, why not? What makes the rules different for them compared to everyone else?

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  3. JDX Gold badge

    Balance

    They're a news site. They make us aware of news, which includes what the companies are claiming. No doubt when it's actually released, they will make us aware of both their own opinions on the matter, and on experts' opinions.

    News means reporting what's happening, not biasing it with your own opinion... El reg typically separates these quite nicely IMO. hence we get Apple rumours passed on, as well.

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  4. Kebabbert

    Still data corruption?

    But is this new filesystem safer than NTFS? NTFS is not safe, and might corrupt your data, as research shows. Reiserfs, ext, JFS, XFS etc - all those filesystems does not give you data integrity.

    ECC RAM is needed because bit flips on random, in RAM. ECC detects and correct those bits. This random bit flip also occurs on disk. NTFS is not designed to detect and correct random bit flips on disk.

    ZFS is designed to detect and correct bit flips, and succeeds well, as research shows:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Data_Integrity

    ZFS is the first filesystem designed to solve this issue. No other filesystem does target this issue. In some years, other filesystems will follow. But Sun/Oracle is first, and others follow. Just as usual.

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    1. eulampios
      Reply Icon

      Yeah, this might be true, however, my own observations are that ntfs had much poorer handling of hardware problems.

      Par exemple, an acquaintance of mine a couple years ago asked to help with her Lenovo laptop running XP. Now I realize that it most probably had a faulty mainboard ( ensuing a sequence of multiple devices failures). When it stopped booting a live ubuntu cd helped to discover it, she had the memory replaced. Then it failed to boot XP again,. The user was sure to previously back up all the data. I booted off a live ubuntu musb thunbdrive . The ntfs partition mounted OK, however 4g-ntfs could not treat it. The user's data were safely copied to my external drive, not from the backup (with ext3 AMOF).

      OK, then came the time to try to remedy the partition with the genuine Lenovo or M$ restore tools and reinstall that piece of the art OS, called Windows XP. However, the corresponding backup utility nor fsck tools could do anything there, nor could they see the drive carrying their own ntfs.

      No I'd rather not. THe user got an Ubuntu and wiped XP off teh hdd. When another accident happened, the rescue utility e2fsck -yf did the job.

      So PoA or PoS, the latter is more expectable from Redmond.

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    2. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Maybe NTFS isn't designed for that

      The hardware ECC in every drive, however, is.

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      1. Kebabbert
        Reply Icon

        @A.C

        "...The hardware ECC in every drive, however, is [protecting against data corruption]..."

        Well, that is not true. If you look at the spec sheet of any Enterprise disk, for instance Fibre Channel disks, or SAS disks you will see typically

        "1 irrecoverable error in every 10^16 bits read"

        This proves that ECC on disks does not protect against bit rot. The same thing with hardware raid - they do not protect against data corruption. There are no checksums for that.

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        1. Anonymous Coward
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          Anonymous Coward

          @Kebabbert

          It proves no such thing, it doesn't say if the error is reading form the physical media itself or if its from a random non-repeating error in the drive electronics or interface chain.

          I also strongly suspect (ie: haven't been arsed to look) that ZFS will have similar caveats.

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        2. Jean-Luc
          Reply Icon
          Thumb Down

          @This proves that ECC on disks...

          It proves no such thing. ECC schemes run a checksum on a set of bits. They guarantee that you can't rot one bit without catching it. More sophisticated schemes may catch more than 1 bit rot on that set - but they all have limits in that, if multiple bits rot in the set and that results in a still-valid checksum at the end, you'll have missed the errors. Cleverer people than me, or you, will be able to quantify the probability of not catching the error. Note also that, depending on your acceptable overhead in lost storage, you could have correction of errors, not just detection. Or at least you can on transmission channels, not sure about HDDs.

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No sparse files support ...

    ... so pass.

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  6. Levente Szileszky
    Thumb Down

    Oh, I'm sorry, am I supposed to be impressed after this PoS called NTFS or...

    ...that other broken PoS I have to deal with on daily basis called CIFS?

    Of course, you bet I am.

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    1. J. Cook Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Go

      Ah, CIFS...

      There's a reason why I pronounce it like it's an STD.

      At least on the netapp we are using for our DFS-referred shares, I can do almost anything to a file, unless some program has a file-level lock on it. (disk-level locks are just plain stupid in this day and age, unless it's a drive diagnostic and repair program.)

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        @J Cook

        Good luck with running a cluster without SCSI Persistent reserve - a disk level lock...

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  7. T J
    WTF?

    Um, what?

    Um, shall I be the one to tell them that nobody uses NTFS anymore, or has one of you already done the honours?

    Local machines don't store much anymore, and nearly all servers are linux running EXT3 or EXT4 or ZFS.

    NTFS is far too slow and space wasting - well, it was only an emergency solution so that NT3 and 4 could crash left right and centre without corrupting disk writes anyway.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Eh?

      My job is analyzing storage and backup environments, I can assure you that you're wrong on all counts.

      Or did you mean to use the troll or joke icon?

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  8. pedromap
    FAIL

    yawn

    why should i care nothing new here cant find the innovation in this thing, boring!!!

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