Week 6 Posting - BSIT200 - Resilient File System (ReFS)

While going over the file systems in the book this week and in the discussion, we talked a little about the future of file systems and the flaws that should be improved upon. Microsoft made an improvement to its file system with the introduction of the Resilient File System (ReFS) with Windows Server 2012. It was created with the intent of being the next-generation file system after NTFS. The only problem currently is that it is only really available for Windows 10 and 11 Pro For Workstations and Enterprise. It can't be used with a single drive but can be used with a pool of drives using the Storage Spaces feature (RAID).

It's designed to maximize data availability, scale efficiently to large data sets across diverse workloads, and provide data integrity with resiliency to corruption. It also seeks to address an expanding set of storage scenarios and other innovations. It introduced new features like automatic metadata integrity checking that can precisely detect corruptions and also fix those corruptions while remaining online. Another new feature that was added is called "Block Cloning" where when you make a copy of a file or data, it doesn't create a new copy, but instead acts like a shortcut to the original file in order to save space. If a program needs to overwrite the data of the "copied" version it will actually create the file so that it can be written on. 

Mirror Accelerated Parity was also a new feature added where you use three drives, two are mirrored and the third is used for parity. If you lose one drive the parity can be used to reconstruct the new drive back to the same as the original. This is what Microsoft has on their website which would explain much better than I ever could:

    

You can't run the "chkdsk" command because the ReFS file system doesn't need to be checked.

The main difference between NTFS to ReFS is the maximum file size and maximum volume size, where it went from 256 TB for each with NTFS to 35 PB for each with ReFS.

This video helped me a lot in understanding the new features of the file system and the Operating Systems that it could be implemented in. ReFS isn't meant for the more common Operating Systems like I had assumed Microsoft would shoot for, but at least it's a step forward in the future of file systems.