this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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It is weird to me that Microsoft hasn't updated the file system in so long. They were going to with Longhorn/VIsta but that failed and it seems like they've been gunshy ever since.
You don’t sound like you weren't around the Windows Vista/Longhorn development days when they promised a successor to NTFS and then over the course of the next couple of years, would bail on that (and nearly every other promise made).
WinFS: https://www.zdnet.com/article/bill-gates-biggest-microsoft-product-regret-winfs/
And FWIW, they are developing ReFS, which looks like it will finally supplant NTFS, but given MS’ business model, don’t expect NTFS to ever really disappear.
Yeah, I definitely was. I think that gave them PTSD or something because they haven't even tried to make moderate changes to NTFS since. And besides ReFS which I hadn't heard about until this thread, they haven't even done something as minor as give you an option to use different file systems like ext4.
NTFS has evolved over the years, but the base structure is mostly unchanged. Things have changed, but not the name. I think they've been using NTFS v3 for a while now...
Yeah, that’s what I mean. There have been small changes, but nothing major and if the other poster was right, even minor changes haven’t been made since 2004.
Meanwhile Apple has come out with APFS and *nix variants have multiple file systems, each more modern than NTFS.
It is weird to me. Here’s hoping reFS or some other file system comes out.
ReFS is out. But only specific revisions of Windows, notably Windows server, can use it for specific use cases.
I tried setting up ReFS on a disk for a cluster of hyper-v systems.... I couldn't because they were using a cluster shared DAS, and in that version of Windows server or ReFS there was no support for cluster access to the FS, it should have otherwise worked, it just seems a bit incomplete at the moment. If I had been using it for cifs access for a single server, then yeah, it probably would have been fine, it was just the clustered direct access that wasn't yet supported.
Windows desktop is unlikely to get ReFS support until the fs is more mature, and it's likely that will be limited to non-os disks for a while.
It's pretty far along right now, it's just that MS isn't going to pop open any Champaign until the fs can hold its own as a direct replacement and upgrade from NTFS, with all the capabilities and features required (and more).
I'll note that the vast majority of systems running some kind of *nix are generally using either ext2 or ext3. Where ext3 is essentially just ext2 with journaling (which is something NTFS has, AFAIK), and ext2 is just as old as NTFS.
We can argue and complain all we want, but these are tried and true, battle tested file systems that do the job adequately for the demands of systems, both in the past, and now. They do one fairly simple thing... Organizing data on disk into files and directories, and enabling that data to be written, updated, read from, and otherwise retrieved when needed.
I know in IT we don't go by the saying "if it's not broken don't fix it", since all of us have horror stories of when you don't fix something that's not broken and something very bad happens.... But I would say that systems like ext2/3 and NTFS have achieved the coveted goal of RFC 1925, rule 12: In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
There's no fat in these file systems. Everything in them generally exists for good reason, the fs is stable and does the required job.
Does that mean we should pack it up, we'll never need another fs again? Absolutely not. We will hit the hard upper limits of what these file systems can do, eventually; probably fairly soon, but that doesn't mean that either is bad simply because they are old.
Honest question: why? NTFS isn't great, it isn't terrible, it's functional. I don't really spend any time thinking about my filesystem. I like having symbolic links on my Linux boxes, but aside from that I just want it to work, and NTFS does.
NTFS has symbolic links as well, I use them all the time
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/mklink
I knew it supported hard links, where the fuck has this been?!
Honest answer: it's fragile. There are many cases of media durability being an issue and there will be going into the future. Adding a layer of ecc in the fs goes a long way.
WinFS wasn't a replacement of NTFS as much as it was a supplement. Documents could be broken apart into atomic pieces, like an embedded image and that would be indexed on its own. Those pieces were kept in something more like a SQL database, more like using binary blobs in SharePoint Portal, but that database still was written to the disk on an NTFS partition as I recall. WinFS was responsible for bringing those pieces back together to represent a compete document if you were transferring it to a non-WinFS filesystem or transferring to a different system altogether. It wasn't a new filesystem as much as it was a database with a filesystem driver.