We saw the leak of Windows Blue (Windows 8.1) build 9369 yesterday and discovered numerous new enhancements to the operating system. It also appears that we may perhaps see ReFS make it to Windows 8.1, as it is currently present in the leaked build.
For those that don’t know, Microsoft introduced ReFS back in 2012, which was touted as a newly engineered file system. “ReFS, (which stands for Resilient File System), is built on the foundations of NTFS, so it maintains crucial compatibility while at the same time it has been architected and engineered for a new generation of storage technologies and scenarios,” Microsoft had stated back in 2012 when the company revealed details about ReFS.
Microsoft has originally planned for ReFS to be delivered in a “staged evolution” of the feature, which meant that we would see it in Windows Server 2012, then the Windows client, then ultimately as a boot volume. Now it looks like Windows 8.1 will introduce ReFS support for the client portion of Windows, as planned.
ReFS contains the following features:
- 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
However, keep in mind that as development of Windows Blue or Windows 8.1 progresses, we can see features get dropped just as easily as new features are added. Are you looking forward to ReFS?
