Wednesday, January 18, 2012

ReFS

Microsoft talks a bit about ReFS -- a new server side file system with some
ZFS and Btrfs features.

phoronix has some good notes for those who interested in short key
features list:

- Unlike NTFS, Microsoft ReFS does share some common traits with Btrfs. ReFS is copy-on-write, provides integrity checksums / ECC, extended attributes, and B-trees. The Sun/Oracle ZFS file-system also shares most of the same features. The storage engine of ReFS is using B+ trees exclusively compared to normal B-trees in Btrfs, with the difference of the plus variant being records stored at the leaf-level of the tree and keys being within the interior nodes.

- ReFS has similar volume/file/directory size limits to EXT4 and Btrfs.


- At least for Windows 8, Microsoft is not providing any upgrade path from NTFS to ReFS, but requires re-formatting the drive and copying any data. Within Windows 8, ReFS is also not supported as a boot partition or for use on removable media/drives.


- Below are the official "key features of ReFS" as said by Microsoft.

- 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

- ReFS does not support data de-duplication, copy-on-write snapshots (a ZFS and Btrfs feature, but ReFS snapshots can be done when paired with the Microsoft Storage Spaces), file-level encryption (dropped from NTFS), or compression (Btrfs can now do Gzip, LZO, and Snappy).

- In what may partially help supporting ReFS in Linux and other platforms, Steven Sinofsky of Microsoft says, "data stored on ReFS is accessible through the same file access APIs on clients that are used on any operating system that can access today’s NTFS volumes." The upper-layer engine is nearly the same as what's found in NTFS, but it's the underlying on-disk storage engine and format that's changed with ReFS.

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