Microsoft has let us all in on what is some pretty big news regarding the future of Windows—the introduction of a new file system, dubbed ReFS (Resilient File System), is expected to exceed way beyond the limitations of NTFS and FAT32.
"Resilient" is an apropriate moniker as the new file system seems to have been designed with one main purpose in mind: keeping data safe and intact. A few ways ReFS does that, according to the Building Windows 8 Blog, is by: keeping metadata integrity with checksums; keeping user data integrity with integrity streams; verifying and auto-correcting data to limit data corruption; isolating corrupt data; and keeping an entire volume intact, online, and accessible.
A lot of the data protection that ReFS is meant to be capable of is available when used in conjunction with Storage Spaces, which provides native RAID and provisioning capabilities within Windows Server 8.
ReFS is offering a number of other advantages over NTFS, such as extremely scalable volume size. It also will push the maximium file length beyond the traditional 255 characters.
Of course, the announcements of ReFS will remind many of the doomed WinFS, the file system that was expected to overtake NTFS when it was announced in 2003 but was laid to rest in 2006. WinFS was a relational file system designed for the storage of structured and unstructured data. While there was never a definitive cause for shelving WinFS from Microsoft, speculation placed the blame on everything from the advent of cloud technology to the fact that NTFS was already a sufficient enough file system.
However, with data storage needs reaching epic proportions, perhaps ReFS, six years later, is more relevant and needed than WinFs. Storage needs cry out for cheaper, bigger, faster and more efficient and above all—rock-solid data protection.
Microsoft has often had to overcome the perception of its OSes being prone to corruption and instability. If it can deliver a file system impervious to many of the plagues that affect its current OSes, like data corruption, give the system blazing read/write speeds (even with huge files), make it integratable with RAID and other data protection technologies, and make it secure and easily compatible with virtualization, then Microsoft's latest file system could truly be an incredible enhancement of NTFS and sure to aid in adoption of Windows 8.
Microsoft plans to initially implement ReFS as a storage system for Windows Server, then as storage for clients and then eventually as a bootable volume.