What is ReFS File System in Windows 8 Server

[Pinku.D]

I was reading one article about the Windows 8 Server and it was mentioned there that it is having the new generation file system as ReFS. There was not much mentioned regarding this and so I am posting this over here. Can somebody tell me some more information regarding this? I will be thankful for all the replies for this.

[Zared]

ReFS (Resilient File System) will only be introduced with the declination of the server operating system. REFS will not be used to boot the OS or on a removable device. Like NTFS, REFS will therefore first his arms with the server version of Windows before they can appear with the client version. REFS has been designed from the rest on the foundations of NTFS and so maintain certain compatibility (no tools for data conversion from NTFS to REFS is expected).

[Jugo]

REFS is built and backward compatible with NTFS. It still leaves some specifics of NTFS "brought little to the price of greater complexity of the system" such as compression or hard-links. REFS innovations are designed to achieve four main goals:

• Check and self-correct any corrupted data
• Adapt to very large storage volumes
• Maintain access to the file system at all times: if data is corrupted, REFS attempt to isolate faults while leaving the rest of the accessible volume
• Improve the overall resilience of the system in conjunction with the Storage Spaces

[Captain Samuel Salt]

One of the novelties of REFS is to significantly increase its robustness against power failure for the management of metadata. The new metadata of a file no longer come overwrite old, but are written at a different location (allocate on write). REFS metadata entries is to minimize the number of operations to be performed by the hard drive. All metadata are also checked on the fly via checksums (checksum). These precautions (allocate on write, checksums) can also be applied to the data itself.

[Bhuvana21]

I would like to tell you that the REFS shows the same theoretical limitations as NTFS: a single file and a single volume cannot exceed the size of 2 64 bytes (16 exabytes).

[Reese-R]

REFS will be available initially only in Windows Server 8. It is but obvious that the necessary steps will be taken towards the NTFS XP at the time. There is no mechanism for converting NTFS -> REFS expected. Finally, REFS can be used either on a boot volume, or on a removable volume.

[Eeshwari3]

It should be as robust as any other file system from Microsoft and in conjunction with the new storage spaces automatically repair faulty data. REFS is indeed largely be compatible with NTFS, but not at any price. So Microsoft has indeed the most frequently used features of NTFS in REFS implemented, some less-used features are omitted to reduce the complexity and size of the code. Other design goals of REFs were extreme scalability and reduced downtime.

[Bahumathi]

It also supports REFS large storage volumes, files and directories. The administration is simplified through storage virtualization. For high performance to provide data striping, fault tolerance is established through redundancy, which includes machines distributed across multiple storage pools. In addition, disk scrubbing is before the disaster by "decaying data" protect. REFS is theoretically able to store files with a maximum size of 2 ^ 64-1 bytes, or approximately 18 trillion bytes, or 16 exabytes.

[TABLITA]

To avoid data corruption during a power failure, the file system never overwrites the existing data structure simply, if a file is changed, but writes the new information first in an empty area of the storage medium. Only when this has finished writing the existing file with the new information is updated.

[Caelyn]

The core concept of REFs it is the function of a disk to ensure, even if the drive fails or comes up with corrupt data. The new file system could be understood as an attempt to Microsoft's traditional SAS RAID systems to make redundant and smaller companies to meet Take the hardware and software to obtain the most favorable. The perspective of REFs in the home is still obscure. At present here an application makes even less sense because of its limitations. The file system cannot be used with removable media, and also start an operating system from a refs portion is not currently possible. Only memory operations are supported.