A New File System For Windows 11
 | Author:
Victor Sample
Vic Sample: MT43 News Treasurer |
A New File System for Windows 11
According to the tech newsletter I receive every weekday morning, Microsoft has added an option for a new file system to the Windows 11 Insider version of Windows. The Windows Insider program lets the more hardy and adventurous users try out new versions of Windows before it becomes widely available.
For about 20 years (since Windows NT) Windows has been using the NTFS (stands for New Technology File System) for windows. NTFS replaced the old MS-Dos file system providing a faster, more reliable file system that could handle much more data than the MS-Dos file system.
My newest laptop has a 1 Terabyte disk drive. A terabyte is 1000 Gigabytes – that is a lot of storage! I have 10s of thousands of files on my laptop – all the pictures on all the websites I have used are stored there. All the files for all the programs I have written are stored there. I use just under half of my 1 Terabyte disk capacity.
The NTFS file system can handle up to 8 Petabytes of storage. A Petabyte is 1000 Terabytes. So, NTFS can handle 8000 times the storage of my small 1 Terabyte disk drive! The new file system is the Resilient File System (ReFS). The ReFS can handle up to 35 PetaBytes (or 3500 times the storage on my 1 Terabyte disk drive).
Suffice it to say that I haven’t heard a lot of people complaining that they are exceeding the limits of the NTFS system on their PCs. The ReFS system is more applicable to server machines that are being used by companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook – companies that store a massive amount of data.
The new ReFS file system has several features that are not available in NTFS: Block Clone, Sparse VDL, Mirror-accelerate parity and File-Level snapshots – all very technical aspects of disk drive technology.
While ReFS does have new capabilities (as well as expanded storage capacity) it lacks support for several important features available in the older NTFS file system: file system compression, encryption support, removable media AND booting your PC.
If and when Microsoft includes ReFS support in Windows to the general public, you would have to opt to use ReFS. Most importantly, there is no direct conversion from the NTFS, so you can only choose to support it during the initial setup and you would likely lose any data you have; so, it would only be appropriate on a new PC or one that you don’t mind losing the data.
Something to keep an eye on for the future – IF Microsoft does include it in the generally available Windows 11.
The information in this article is from https://www.ghacks.net by Martin Brinkmann.
