The first developments of the ReFS file system appeared in 2012 directly in Windows Server 2012. Now the technology is observed in the Windows 8 and 10 operating systems, as a replacement for NTFS. You need to figure out why ReFS is better than other file systems and whether it can be used on home computers.
Concept of ReFS
ReFS (Resilient file system)– is a fault-tolerant technology that replaced NTFS. Designed to eliminate the shortcomings of its predecessor and reduce the amount of information that can be lost during various operations. Supports working with large files.
So, one of the advantages of the technology is high data security from destruction. The media contains checksums and metadata designed to determine the integrity of the data on the partitions. The scan occurs during read/write operations and immediately detects damaged files.
Benefits of ReFS
The ReFS file system (FS) has the following features:
- Great productivity;
- Improving the ability to check media for errors;
- Low degree of data loss when file system errors and bad blocks occur;
- Implementation of EFS encryption;
- Disk quota functionality;
- Increased maximum file limit to 18.3 EB;
- Increased number of files stored in a folder to 18 trillion;
- Maximum disk capacity up to 402 EB;
- The number of characters in the file name has been increased to 32767.
There are, of course, many opportunities, but that’s not all. However, it is worth considering one point: how useful will all these advantages be to the average user?
For a user working on a computer at home, it will be useful, perhaps, fast speed checking partitions for errors and reducing file loss in the event of these errors. Of course, in this case, security is carried out only at the file system level, that is, it only solves its own problems, and the problem of losing important files still remains topical issue. For example, this could happen due to a hard drive failure. The technology has the greatest effect in.
The advantage of RAID is high fault tolerance and data safety, as well as high speed work, the most used RAID levels are 1 and 2. The disadvantages of the system are the high cost of purchasing equipment, as well as the time spent on implementation. I think that the average user has no use for this if he does not create home server, working 24/7.
Performing tests based on ReFS and NTFS
Using software We managed to find out that using the ReFS file system compared to NTFS does not provide a noticeable increase in performance. Tests based on similar read and write cycles occurring on the same disk and file sizes, the Crystal Disk Mark utility showed identical results. ReFS had a slight advantage when copying small files.
There were tests using large files, and a slow hard drive partition was used as a guinea pig. The results were disappointing as ReFS showed lower performance compared to NTFS.
There is no doubt that the technology is still raw, the indicators were carried out at the end of 2017, but in Windows 10 the technology can be widely used. The best option FS usage will be based on SSD – solid state drives. These drives are better than HDDs in almost every way.
Benefits of ReFS for other users
The system has such a function as a hypervisor - Hyper-V. This technology is a virtual machine. When using a partition formatted in ReFS, there was an advantage in operating speed. Since the file system uses checksums and metadata, it only needs to refer to them when copying files; if there is a match, it does not have to physically copy the data.
Creation virtual disks in ReFS it takes seconds. In NTFS this process takes minutes. Fixed virtual disks in NTFS are created by delays and are heavily loaded HDD, with SSDs this is an even bigger problem, since a large number of rewrite cycles is “deadly” for the media. Because of this, working in the background with other applications will be problematic.
It is also planned that high degree ReFS compatibility will be observed with such virtual machines, like VMware.
Disadvantages of the ReFS file system
Above we looked at the advantages of ReFS technology and touched a little on the disadvantages. Let's talk about the disadvantages in more detail. We must understand that until Microsoft implements the technology in Windows, there will be no development. Now we have the following features:
- Existing Windows partitions not subject to ReFS use, that is, it is necessary to use only partitions not used for the system, for example, those intended for storing files.
- External drives are not supported.
- It is impossible to convert an NTFS disk to a ReFS disk without data loss, only formatting and backup important files.
- Not all software is able to recognize this FS.
That's it. Now look at the image below. This Windows 7 and here the FS is not recognized, and an error appears when opening the partition.
In Windows 8, the partition will need to be formatted, since the FS is also not recognized. Before using a new file system on your home PC, it is better to think about the consequences several times. In Windows 8.1, the problem is solved by activating the FS using the registry editor, but this does not always work, especially since using ReFS implies formatting the disk and destroying data.
Some problems occur in Windows 10. If new section works stably with ReFS, then the existing one, which was formatted into it, is not recognized by Windows.
How to format a disk or partition in ReFS
Let’s say the user doesn’t care about the shortcomings and shortcomings of the new product. God bless you, friends, let's start analyzing the instructions for formatting a partition in ReFS. I’ll tell you one thing: if something suddenly happens and the partition fails, you can use the R-Studio tool to restore it.
This is interesting:
To format, just follow the following procedure:
- Open “This PC” and click right click mouse on the desired section;
- IN context menu click on the item "Format";
- In the window that opens, in the field “ File system"we find REFS;
- Press the button "Begin" and wait.
The same can be done using the command line, where you need to enter the following commands one by one:
- diskpart– utility for working with disks;
- lis vol– display all partitions of the computer;
- sel vol 3– where 3 is the number of the required volume;
- format fs=refs– formatting into the desired file system.
How to enable ReFS using the registry
If you don't have anything that points to FS, it may need to be enabled. For this we need a registry editor. The procedure works properly on Windows 8.1 and 10:
- Launch the registry editor (Win+R and enter regedit);
- Let's go to this thread - HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem;
- On the right side of the window, create a 32-bit DWORD parameter with the name RefsDisableLastAccessUpdate;
- Enter the number 1 as the value.
- Finding a branch HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control;
- Create a section with the name MiniNT
As you can see, the opportunity to use ReFS exists, but for now it is not recommended to use it, especially for home computer it does not make sense. Restore lost files It will be problematic, and not all programs understand FS.
Most likely, the technology will develop most on servers, but this will not happen soon. If we remember the advent of NTFS, its full implementation took about seven years. More information can be found on the official Microsoft website - https://docs.microsoft.com/ru-ru/windows-server/storage/refs/refs-overview. In the meantime, you can follow new IT technologies on our website, do not forget to subscribe.
Why is the system called ReFS?
ReFS stands for Resilient File System- “fault-tolerant file system”. While improvements are being made on many fronts, resiliency remains a priority.
What are the capacity limits of the ReFS system?
Power limits for disk format are listed in the table below. Limits depend on various factors, such as system configuration (for example, memory size), limits set by various system components, and the time required to populate data sets, creation time backup copies etc.
| Attribute | Disc Format Limit |
| Maximum single file size | 2^64-1 bytes |
| Maximum single volume size | The format supports 2^78 bytes with a cluster size of 16 KB (2^64 * 16 * 2^10). Windows stack addressing allows 2^64 bytes |
| Maximum number of files in a directory | 2^64 |
| Maximum number of directories per volume | 2^64 |
| Maximum file name length | 32 thousand Unicode characters |
| Maximum path length | 32 thousand |
| Maximum size of any storage pool | 4 PB |
| Maximum number of storage pools on the system | Not limited |
| Maximum number of spaces in a storage pool | Not limited |
Is it possible to convert data between NTFS and ReFS?
Windows 8 does not have the option to convert data in-place. Data can be copied. This was a deliberate design decision, given how large data sets are today and how inconvenient it would be to convert in place, as well as the likely changes in architecture before and after conversion.
Can I boot from ReFS on Windows Server 8?
Is it possible to use ReFS on removable media or disks?
No, this feature is not implemented or supported.
What NTFS semantics or features are no longer supported in ReFS?
We have abandoned support in ReFS following functions NTFS: named pipes, short names, compression, file-level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, chunked caching, hard links, extended attributes, and quotas.
What about parity based spaces and ReFS?
ReFS is supported by the fault tolerance features provided by storage spaces. In Windows Server 8, automatic data correction occurs only for mirrored spaces.
Is clustering supported?
Failover clustering is supported, and individual volumes can change resources upon failure. In addition, it is supported sharing storage pools in the cluster.
What about RAID? How to use ReFS's data striping, mirroring, and other forms of RAID capabilities? Does ReFS provide the data reading speed needed, for example, for video files?
ReFS leverages the data redundancy capabilities of storage spaces, including distributed mirrors and parity. The read speed of a ReFS system is expected to be about the same as that of an NTFS system, with which they share a lot of code. This will be great for streaming.
How come ReFS doesn't provide deduplication, L2 caching between DRAM and storage, and snapshot writing?
ReFS itself does not provide deduplication. One side effect of this familiar, pluggable file system architecture is that other deduplication products will be able to connect to ReFS in the same way they connect to NTFS.
Second-level caching is not explicitly implemented in ReFS, but customers can take advantage of third-party solutions.
ReFS and VSS work together to create snapshots in the same way that NTFS does in Windows environments. They currently do not support snapshot recording or snapshots larger than 64 TB.
,NTFS And FAT32 are not the only file systems that Windows 10 can see and read. It also supports legacy FAT, expanded exFAT, new ReFS, virtual CDFS, and also partially with those used in Linux EXT2 And EXT3. When working with disks, including removable ones, you may need to determine the current file system of the media or logical partition. In Windows 10 you can do this in different ways.
Simplest- this is to open the disk properties and see what is specified in the parameter.
However, this method is only suitable for those drives that have a letter and explicitly "native" file system, if the media or partition is formatted in EXT3 or due to a failure it will be determined as RAW, it will not be available in Explorer. In this case, you should use a snap-in or console utility to determine the file system.
By pressing Win+ X open the Start button menu, launch the snap-in and look at the contents of the column.
The snap-in will display even those disks and partitions that do not have a letter. Another way to look FS carrier is to use the utility. Open command line and run these two commands in it:
list volume
The first command launches the utility, the second displays a list of all logical partitions. You will find the information you need in the column FS. Alternative - console. To find out the file system type for all disks, run it as an administrator and run the command get-volume. The searched values will be listed in the column FileSystemType.
Alas, all the methods described above have a common drawback, namely incorrect recognition of Linux file systems CDFS And EXT2/3/4 .
So, in our example determined CDFS How Unknown and the Disk Management snap-in identified CDFS correct, but could not recognize EXT3, defining it as RAW, that is, like the absence of a file system. Standard tools began to show correct results only after installation - utilities and drivers to provide access to media EXT2/3/4 from under Windows.
And since we're talking about EXT2/3/4, at the same time it is also worth mentioning file systems HFS or HFS+, used in poppies. When connected to a Windows computer, they will also not be detected and in order to be able to work with them, you need to install a driver Paragon HFS+ or MacDrive.
In this article we'll figure it out what features does ReFS provide and why is it better than the NTFS file system?. How to recover data from ReFS disk space. New ReFS file system from Microsoft was originally introduced in Windows Server 2012. It is also included in Windows 10 as part of the Disk Space tool. ReFS can be used for a disk pool. The file system has been improved with the release of Windows Server 2016 and will soon be available in new version Windows 10
What features does ReFS provide and how is it better than the current NTFS system?
Content:What does ReFS mean?
Abbreviation for "Resilient File System", ReFS is a new system based on NTFS. On at this stage ReFS does not offer a comprehensive replacement for NTFS for home users' disk use. The file system has its advantages and disadvantages.
ReFS is intended to solve the main problems of NTFS. It is more resilient to data corruption, handles higher workloads better, and easily scales to very large file systems. Let's look at what this means?
ReFS protects data from corruption
The file system uses checksums for metadata and may also use checksums for file data. While reading or writing a file, the system checks checksum to make sure it is correct. This enables detection of corrupted data in real time.
ReFS is integrated with the Disk Space feature. If you have configured a mirrored data store, ReFS will allow Windows to detect and automatically repair file system corruption by copying data from another drive. This feature is available in both Windows 10 and Windows 8.1.
If the file system detects damaged data that does not have an alternative copy for recovery, then ReFS will immediately delete such data from the disk. This does not require rebooting the system or unplugging the storage device, as is the case with NTFS.
The need to use the chkdsk utility completely disappears, since the file system is automatically corrected immediately when an error occurs. New system It is also resistant to other types of data corruption. NTFS, when writing file metadata, writes it directly. If there is a power outage or computer crash during this time, you will experience data corruption.
When metadata changes, ReFS creates a new copy of the data and associates the data with a file only after the metadata is written to disk. This eliminates the possibility of data corruption. This feature is called copy-on-write, and it is also present in other popular operating systems. Linux systems: ZFS, BtrFS, and Apple APFS file system.
ReFS removes some NTFS restrictions
ReFS is more modern and supports much larger volumes and longer file names than NTFS. In the long term, these are important improvements. In the NTFS file system, a file name is limited to 255 characters; in ReFS, a file name can contain up to 32768 characters. Windows 10 lets you disable the character limit for file files NTFS systems but it is always disabled on ReFS volumes.
ReFS no longer supports short filenames in DOS 8.3 format. On an NTFS volume you can access C:\Program Files\ V C:\PROGRA~1\ to ensure compatibility with older software.
NTFS has a theoretical maximum capacity of 16 exabytes, while ReFS has a theoretical maximum capacity of 262,144 exabytes. Although it doesn't really matter now, computers are constantly evolving.
Which file system is faster ReFS or NTFS?
ReFS was not designed to improve file system performance over NTFS. Microsoft has made ReFS much more efficient in certain cases.
For example, when used with Disk Space, ReFS supports "real-time optimization". Let's say you have a storage pool with two disks, one provides maximum performance, the other is used for volume. ReFS will always write data to the faster disk, ensuring maximum performance. IN background the file system will automatically move large chunks of data to slower drives for long-term storage.
In Windows Server 2016, Microsoft has improved ReFS to provide better performance virtual machine functions. The Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machine takes advantage of these benefits (in theory, any virtual machine can take advantage of ReFS).
For example, ReFS supports block cloning, this speeds up the cloning process virtual machines and checkpoint merging operations. To create a copy of a virtual machine, ReFS only needs to write the new metadata to disk and provide a link to the existing data. This is because in ReFS, multiple files can point to the same underlying data on disk.
When a virtual machine writes new data to disk, it is written to a different location, but the original virtual machine data remains on disk. This greatly speeds up the cloning process and requires much less bandwidth disk.
ReFS also offers new feature "rare VDL", which allows ReFS to quickly write zeros to large file. This greatly speeds up the creation of a new, empty virtual file. hard drive fixed size (VHD). In NTFS this operation can take 10 minutes, in ReFS – a few seconds.
Why ReFS can't replace NTFS
Despite a number of advantages, ReFS cannot yet replace NTFS. Windows cannot boot from a ReFS partition and requires NTFS. ReFS does not support NTFS features such as data compression, file system encryption, hard links, extended attributes, data deduplication, and disk quotas. But unlike NTFS, ReFS allows you to perform full disk encryption using BitLocker, including system structures disk.
Windows 10 does not allow you to format a partition in ReFS; this file system is only available within Disk Space. ReFS protects data used across multiple pools hard drives from damage. In Windows Server 2016, you can format volumes using ReFS instead of NTFS. Such a volume can be used to store virtual machines, but the operating system can still only boot from NTFS.
Hetman Partition Recovery allows you to analyze disk space managed by the ReFS file system using a signature analysis algorithm. Analyzing the device sector by sector, the program finds certain sequences of bytes and displays them to the user. Restoring data from ReFS disk space is no different from working with the NTFS file system:
- Download and install the program;
- Analyze the physical disk that is included in the disk space;
- Select and save the files that need to be recovered;
- Repeat steps 2 and 3 for all disks included in the disk space.
The future of the new file system is rather unclear. Microsoft may improve ReFS to replace outdated NTFS in all Windows versions. On this moment ReFS cannot be used everywhere and only serves certain tasks.
The method of storing anything usually always implies some kind of orderliness, but if in human life it is not prerequisite, then in the world of computers, storing data without it is almost impossible. This orderliness is reflected in the file system, a concept familiar to most users of different electronic devices and operating systems.
A file system can be compared to a kind of markup that determines how, where, and in what way each byte should be written to the media. The first file systems that appeared at the dawn of the electronic era were very imperfect, such as Minix, a file system that has a lot of limitations and is used in the same operating system Minix, which later became the prototype of the Linux kernel.
But time passed, new file systems appeared, more advanced and stable. Today the most popular of them, at least among Windows users, is NTFS, which replaced FAT32, which is now used only in small flash drives and has many disadvantages, the most significant of which is the inability to write files larger than 4 GB. However, NTFS is not without them. So, according to many experts, it lacks efficiency, performance and stability, therefore, the time has come to think about creating an even more advanced file system that can meet the growing demands from first server, and then client systems.
And so, in 2012, Microsoft developers introduced the Resilient File System, or ReFS for short, a recoverable file system positioned as an alternative to NTFS, and in the future, possibly its replacement. In fact, ReFS is a continuation of the development of NTFS, from which it was decided to remove all unnecessary things that never became popular, and add new features instead.
New in Resilient File System:
- Architecture using function (Storage Spaces)
- High fault tolerance. File system errors that led to data loss in NTFS will be minimized in ReFS
- Isolation of damaged areas. If areas of the file system are damaged, the recorded data can be accessed from under running Windows
- Proactive error correction. Automatically scans volumes for damage and applies preventative data recovery measures
- Automatic recovery of subfolders and associated files when metadata is damaged
- Using redundant writes to improve fault tolerance
- The maximum volume size in ReFS can reach 402 EB versus 18.4 EB in NTFS
- A file of 18.3 EB can be written to a file formatted in ReFS
- The number of files in one folder is 18 trillion. versus 4.3 billion in NTFS
- The length of the file name and path to it is 32767 versus 255 in NTFS
What will be removed:
- Data compression support
- Data encryption using EFS technology
- Extended file attributes
- Hard links
- Disk quotas
- Support for short names and object IDs
- Possibility of changing the cluster size (remains in question)
What will be inherited from NTFS:
- Access Control Lists (ACLs)
- Creating Volume Snapshots
- Mount points
- Reprocessing points
- BitLocker encryption
- Creating and using symbolic links
- Recording all changes occurring in the file system (USN log)
Currently, ReFS is in the early testing stage, however, computer geeks can appreciate the benefits of ReFS now, and on the client Windows system 8.1 or 10. To do this, you will need to perform the following registry tweak:
However, using ReFS on an ongoing basis is not recommended. Firstly, the system is still unfinished, and secondly, there is any possibility of conversion to ReFS and vice versa third party programs missing, thirdly, if you accidentally lose or delete files from a partition formatted in ReFS, there will be nothing to restore them with, since there are no data recovery programs that work with this file system yet.
Should we expect the implementation of ReFS in the near future? We can say with greater certainty that no. If she gets practical use, then first on server systems, which will also not happen soon, but users of client Windows will have to wait at least another five years after this. Suffice it to recall the implementation of NTFS on client systems, and then it took Microsoft seven years. Well, the most important thing is that there is simply no special need for ReFS. That's when they will appear on desktop computers zettabyte disks, then perhaps the finest hour will come for ReFS, but for now we just have to be patient and wait.
Have a great day!
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