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In this blog post I’d like to talk about a new file system for Windows. This file system, which we call ReFS, has been designed from the ground up to meet a broad set of customer requirements, both today’s and tomorrow’s, for all the different ways that Windows is deployed.
The key features of ReFS are as follows (note that some of these features are provided in conjunction with Storage Spaces).
•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
As reported this past fortnight, Microsoft's new Storage Spaces for Windows 8 is only half the story; the operating system builder is also throwing in a new Resilient File System (ReFS) while retaining most NTFS features and semantics.
Storage Spaces is a Windows 8 feature that enables a PC user to aggregate physical disk drives into a storage pool from which virtual drives are carved out; these imaginary disks then benefit from self-healing data integrity features. Storage Spaces is aimed at client PCs using NTFS. ReFS is designed for servers, but will be adapted for clients so it can be ultimately used across both system classes.
ReFS, which was co-designed with Storage Spaces, is expected to cope with much greater scale than NTFS, and data is verified and auto-corrected using checksums, just like Storage Spaces. In fact it aims to be resilient end-to-end when used in conjunction with Storage Spaces.
[edited by: bill at 7:18 am (utc) on Jan 19, 2012]
[edit reason] tidy up [/edit]
