Microsoft explains Windows 8’s new file system ReFS or “Resilient File System”. In the past the company talked about ReFS, now they are implementing it.
The software giant has designed ReFS from the ground up to meet the storage needs and overcome limitations from today and tomorrow. ReFS has the ability to handle large capacity volumes, share storage pools with different systems, and has resiliency to corruption. At the beginning the next-generation file system will only be available in Windows Server 8 and only for data storage file system — meaning servers won’t be able to boot from it, nor it can be used in removable storage media. As the technology behind ReFS evolves, Microsoft will eventually make the file system capable, so Windows can boot from it.
At launch, Windows 8 — the client version — won’t have this feature, but the company has plans to make the new file system available for Windows users in the future.
ReFS was built from the ground up, but it is based on NTFS — current Windows file system — and this has been done on purpose to keep compatibility between the two.
As you may have heard, Microsoft recently unveiled Storage Spaces, and now with ReFS, they work together to complete an overhaul storage solution in Windows 8. Users can expect from ReFS: detection of all forms of disk corruption with self-recovery, support for performance with data stripping, and an allocate on write model a.k.a copy-on-write — this is a concept that the software maker has been using on its SQL Server products and in Shadow Copy Windows service for a long time, which will add the ability to create a rapid snapshot of a large data set.
The next-generation file system ReFS is only going to be part of Windows Server 8, but the company made it clear that Windows 8 will be able to access and read ReFS volumes.
If you want to read every single detail about ReFS, check out the article at the Building Windows 8 Blog.
