ReFS

Resilient File System

Developed by Microsoft as a successor to the NTFS file system, it is the most reliable and scalable file system for Microsoft Windows operating systems. ReFS was designed to overcome problems of NTFS file system, which are related to how data storage requirements had changed.

The key design advantages of ReFS include automatic integrity checking and data scrubbing, removal of the need for running chkdsk, protection against data degradation, built-in handling of hard disk drive failure and redundancy, integration of RAID functionality, a switch to copy/allocate on write for data and metadata updates, handling of very long paths and filenames, and storage virtualization and pooling, including almost arbitrarily sized logical volumes (unrelated to the physical sizes of the used drives).

Major new features, compared to NTFS:

  • Capacity - 64-bit file system supports a maximum volume size is 1 yobibyte (280 bytes).
  • Built-in resilience
  • Improved reliability for on-disk structures
  • Data deduplication

Removed features, compared to NTFS:

  • NTFS compression
  • Encrypting File System (EFS)
  • Transactional NTFS
  • Hard links
  • Extended attributes
  • Disk quotas
  • 8.3 filenames