As a full time desktop Linux user since 1999 (the actual year of the Linux desktop, I swear) I wish all you Windows folks the best of luck on the next clean install π
...and Happy 30th Birthday "New Technology" File System!
Comment by someone who hasn't used Windows in an age. When was the last time you rebooted because you had installed new software? When was the last time you ran random code from a forum post to make software work? Because this windows user doesn't remember ever doing that.
Edit: Just to clarify, I run ALOT of operating systems in my lab; RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu (several LTS flavors), TruNAS, Unraid, RancherOS, ESXi, Windows 2003 thru 2022, Windows 10, Windows 11.
My latest headless Steam box with Windows 11 based on a AMD 5600g basically reboots about as fast as I can retype my password in RDP.
Omg. This hits home. I think Linux has prompted / asked me to reboot one time since I installed it 2 months ago. Windows wants you to reboot everytime you change anything. I didn't realize how insanely often it asks until I had something to compare it to.
I got a friend trying Linux for the first time and they asked for some help picking software to install, like which office suite or photo app etc... They just instinctively rebooted after everything they did like it was a pavlovian response, lol.
Whatβs the benefit to the average end user to modernizing NTFS?
Sure, I love having btrfs on my NAS for all the features it brings, but Iβm not a normal person. What significant changes that would affect your average user does NTFS require to modernize it?
I just see it as an βif itβs not brokenβ type thing. I canβt say Iβve ever given the slightest care about what filesystem my computer was running until I got into NAS/backups, which itself was a good 10 years after I got into building PCs. The way I see it, it doesnβt really matter when Iβm reinstalling every few years and have backups elsewhere.
Near instantaneous snapshots and rollback (would help with system restore etc)
Compression that uses a modern algorithm
Checking for silent corruption, so users know if their files are no longer correct
I'd add better built in multi-device support and recovery (think RAID and drive pooling) but that might be beyond the "average" user (which is always a vague term and I feel there are many types of users within that average). E.g. users that mod their games can benefit from snapshots and/or reflink copies allowing to make backups of their game dirs without taking up any additional space beyond the changes that the mods add.
At the very least, better filesystem level compression support. A somewhat common usecase might be people who use emulators. Both Wii U and PS3 are consoles where major emulators just use a folder on your filesystem. I know a lot of emulator users who are non-technical to the point that they don't have "show hidden files and folders" enabled.
Also your average person wouldn't necessarily need checksums, but having them built into the filesystem would lead to overall more reliability.
Furthermore, apps using the unicode versions of functions (which all apps should be doing for a couple decades now) have 32kb maximum character length paths.
I think they mean the full path length. As in you can't nest folders too deep or the total path length hits a limit. Not individual folder name limits.
File paths. Not just the filename, the entire directory path, including the filename. It's way too easy to run up against limit if you're actually organized.
I wouldn't really say so. Of course it's not a good idea take the absolutely latest system as your daily driver since it's propably not bugproof yet but also you don't want to use something extremely old just because it's been tested much more because then you're just trading away perfomance and features for nothing. For example ext4 is extremely reliable and the stable version is 15year newer than NTFS.
I'm a client-side technician working in a predominantly Windows environment for the last 8 going on 9 years.
Out of all the issues I have seen on Windows, filesystem issues is rather low on that list as far as prevalence, as I don't recall one that's not explainable by hardware failure or interrupted write. Not saying it doesn't happen and that ext4 is bad or anything, but I don't work in Linux all that much so me saying that I never had an issue with ext4 isn't the same because I don't have nearly the same amount of experience.
Also ext came about in 1992, so 31 years so far to hash out the bugs is no small amount of time. Especially in terms of computing.
It is weird to me that Microsoft hasn't updated the file system in so long. They were going to with Longhorn/VIsta but that failed and it seems like they've been gunshy ever since.
You donβt sound like you weren't around the Windows Vista/Longhorn development days when they promised a successor to NTFS and then over the course of the next couple of years, would bail on that (and nearly every other promise made).
And FWIW, they are developing ReFS, which looks like it will finally supplant NTFS, but given MSβ business model, donβt expect NTFS to ever really disappear.
Yeah, I definitely was. I think that gave them PTSD or something because they haven't even tried to make moderate changes to NTFS since. And besides ReFS which I hadn't heard about until this thread, they haven't even done something as minor as give you an option to use different file systems like ext4.
NTFS has evolved over the years, but the base structure is mostly unchanged. Things have changed, but not the name. I think they've been using NTFS v3 for a while now...
Yeah, thatβs what I mean. There have been small changes, but nothing major and if the other poster was right, even minor changes havenβt been made since 2004.
Meanwhile Apple has come out with APFS and *nix variants have multiple file systems, each more modern than NTFS.
It is weird to me. Hereβs hoping reFS or some other file system comes out.
It is weird to me that Microsoft hasnβt updated the file system in so long.
Honest question: why? NTFS isn't great, it isn't terrible, it's functional. I don't really spend any time thinking about my filesystem. I like having symbolic links on my Linux boxes, but aside from that I just want it to work, and NTFS does.
Honest answer: it's fragile. There are many cases of media durability being an issue and there will be going into the future. Adding a layer of ecc in the fs goes a long way.
WinFS wasn't a replacement of NTFS as much as it was a supplement. Documents could be broken apart into atomic pieces, like an embedded image and that would be indexed on its own. Those pieces were kept in something more like a SQL database, more like using binary blobs in SharePoint Portal, but that database still was written to the disk on an NTFS partition as I recall. WinFS was responsible for bringing those pieces back together to represent a compete document if you were transferring it to a non-WinFS filesystem or transferring to a different system altogether. It wasn't a new filesystem as much as it was a database with a filesystem driver.
XFS is more like ext3 or ext4 than zfs. It has now COW, snapshots, although it is very performant and can handle very large volumes. It's a pretty good all around filesystem. I trust it more than ext4, but you also can't shrink it, like you can ext4.
I use both. I like Linux better, even more since W10. It's spyware, crap, all those nasty things. But hey, I'm a pc gamer and, sadly enough, my games (80% of them) all get funcky in Linux (wine, playonlinux,... I tried it all), so guess I'm stuck with the crap. But again, Linux is far better and superior
This might sound ignorant but that's cause I am. Why doesn't windows just use ext4, btrfs, XFS, or something open source. They wouldn't have to worry about developing it so it'd be a load off their chest and they could get really good features that even NTFS doesn't have. Well maybe not with ext4 but with btrfs
Microsoft really really hated open source some time ago. Now they seem to have embraced it, however some still think that might be an attempt to EEE.
Still, I suppose Microsoft doesn't think replacing the Windows default filesystem is a sound investment at this point even if the political resistance to such a change is, supposedly, gone.
XFS, the default filesystem in Red Hat, is older than NTFS. Released 1994.
I'll say this, the previous admin of one of the Linux servers I support set up RAID-0 striping for the main data slice (must have been dropped on their head as a child or something). Two drives, and one of the drives developed bad sectors, but I was still able to recover 95% of the data before it shit the bed completely. So, XFS is apparently quite resilient, or I got lucky.
Does NTFS allow for merging of disks into a single partition? Apple was able to do this by combing a larger HDD with a smaller SSD into a single virtual HFS+ volume.
Yep. You need to convert the disk into a "dynamic disk" (no data loss btw) and then you can create a "spanned volume" across the disks. You can also create a striped volume for performance, which is basically RAID 0.
But apparently dynamic disks are now deprecated and Microsoft wants you to use "storage spaces" instead, which is basically RAID and not just simple spanned volumes. The problem with this, IIRC, is that you'll need at least two extra drives (in addition to the drive where Windows is installed).
I don't think a spanned volume is quite what they were after. I'm pretty sure macOS uses the SSD part as a cache and it's used mainly for increasing the performance of the relatively slow but large capacity HDD. Nowadays though you might as well just go with all SSD in most cases if performance matters.
Btrfs FTW. EXT 4 is also pretty darn good. Windows is a joke not a good fit for my use cases and has privacy issues about many others. I just it very occasionally but mostly run Arch Linux for my needs. Windows Games are running better under WINE/Proton than native in Windows often now.
The only reason why I am running Linux and Windows in dual boot is because of Valorant and the Office 365 suite. Otherwise I would already be done with Windows. Linux is just amazing.