Windows Valley

It's all about Windows and its experience!

  • Home
  • Windows
  • Downloads
  • Internet Explorer
  • Office
  • Help & How-To
  • Contact Us

Published: January 18, 2012 by RKONIT

Microsoft introduces ReFS in Windows Server 8

Windows 8 has a new file system called ReFS (stands for Resilient File System) which is built on the foundations of NTFS. However ReFS is the part of Windows Server 8 only and will be accessible from clients.

The key goals of ReFS are:

  • Maintain a high degree of compatibility with a subset of NTFS features that are widely adopted while deprecating others that provide limited value at the cost of system complexity and footprint.
  • Verify and auto-correct data. Data can get corrupted due to a number of reasons and therefore must be verified and, when possible, corrected automatically. Metadata must not be written in place to avoid the possibility of “torn writes,” which we will talk about in more detail below.
  • Optimize for extreme scale. Use scalable structures for everything. Don’t assume that disk-checking algorithms, in particular, can scale to the size of the entire file system.
  • 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.
  • Provide a full end-to-end resiliency architecture when used in conjunction with the Storage Spaces feature, which was co-designed and built in conjunction with ReFS.

ReFS Features:

  • 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

Additionally ReFS holds the legacy features and semantics from NTFS including BitLocker encryption, access-control lists for security, USN journal, change notifications, symbolic links, junction points, mount points, reparse points, volume snapshots, file IDs, and oplocks while named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes, and quotas have been dropped.

You can also read Microsoft’s newest blogpost written by Microsoft’s Surendra Verma on its Windows 8 blog site that gives more details on ReFS.

Last Review: February 5, 2012

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

  • Google promotes Google Chrome 28 to the Stable Channel
  • OEM partners to get Windows 8.1 RTM in late August
  • Opera 15 is stable now, brings fresh design and a new engine
  • Windows 8.1 Preview goes live, Download Now!
  • Windows 8.1 Preview’s minimum system requirements

Recent Comments

  • Mukul on How to reset/leave HomeGroup completely
  • harmony on How to Reset Microsoft Office Dictionary to Factory default
  • Moyin on How to Uninstall/Clean MySQL from Windows completely
  • Ricardo on How to Uninstall/Clean MySQL from Windows completely
  • Thunder on Remove “Shared Folder Synchronization” from Right-click Context Menu

Archives

Categories

  • Ebooks
  • Internet Explorer
  • More
  • Office
  • Reviews
  • Software
  • Visual Studio
  • Windows
  • Windows Live
  • Windows Phone
  • Windows Server

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Copyright © 2022 · Windows Valley · Some rights reserved · Privacy & cookies · Terms of use
All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.