The Resilient File System (ReFS) will soon be available in Windows 11 or 12. Even though ReFS has been there for a long time (since Windows 8), the technology has only been accessible for secondary drives. The business didn’t start promoting ReFS as the file system for the operating system’s bootable partition until the most recent Windows 11 previews.
The technology that controls the storage and retrieval of data from a partition is called a file system. Like its predecessors, Windows 11 still makes use of the NT File System (NTFS), which was first released in 1993 as part of the Windows NT 3.1 release and is still the most widely used file system today.
Even while NTFS has been providing many capabilities for managing data on a partition, including performance and dependability, that aren’t found in other file systems, this technology has been around for a long time and isn’t up to date with many of the demands of modern life. Microsoft has been working on ReFS to replace it for these and other reasons.
ReFS and NTFS for the desktop edition of Windows will be briefly compared in this guide.
NTFS vs. ReFS major differences
Here is how Windows 11’s NTFS and ReFS vary from one another.
Based on NTFS, ReFS is a new file system technology created to get around the drawbacks of the old file system. The new file system’s capacity to manage massive volumes of data is one of its primary advantages.
Microsoft prioritized compatibility, high availability, data integrity, resilience, and scalability, among other important factors, when creating the file system.
Given that NTFS will continue to be used for some time to come, compatibility is essential to preserving support for its capabilities. This implies that any other operating system that supports access to NTFS volumes can likewise access the data contained on a ReFS volume.
BitLocker, mount points, junction points, security, USN journal, volume snapshots, symbolic links, file IDs, change notifications, and oplocks are a few of the NTFS features that are accessible in ReFS.
Named streams, object IDs, extended attributes, file-level encryption, compression, sparse, hard links, quotas, and short names are a few of the features that aren’t accessible on ReFS.
In the event of corruption, high availability means that the file system can isolate the problematic portion of the partition while providing uninterrupted access to the other data. Furthermore, the file system facilitates storage sharing among devices, offering fault tolerance and load balancing.
In the event of corruption, data integrity enables ReFS to instantly check and fix data and metadata (without restarting the computer). This is accomplished using the integrity stream, which examines checksums for metadata in order to identify defects, and the disk scrubbing function, which fixes issues with drive errors that are already there but have not yet manifested.
Alongside storage spaces, resilience is a characteristic that provides high data availability through various storage configurations with multiple drives, including parity and mirror.
Scalability allows the file system to overcome NTFS’s restrictions and manage extremely high storage capacities. For instance, the largest file size that a ReFS volume can hold is 16 million terabytes (16 exabytes), and it can hold up to 1.2 trillion terabytes (1 yobibyte). NTFS volumes, however, have a maximum size of 256 terabytes.
Redundancy for failure tolerance and improved data scripting performance handling are other improvements. Additionally, the system may read and write data on files with just one instruction, reducing the disk IOPS per transaction as well as power, storage, and memory utilization.
The file system enhances virtualization performance through the use of Block cloning and Sparse VDL, among other performance advantages. In summary, Spare VDL is a feature that helps to speed up the creation of fixed virtual disks, and Block cloning is accessible on servers to speed up the copy process, increasing the merge of the virtual machine checkpoints.
It’s crucial to remember that USB flash drives and other detachable drives cannot be utilized with ReFS. Like other file systems, the Resilient File System does not include a conversion option. To switch file systems, you will need to backup your data, reformat your drive, and then restore your data.
ReFS vs. NTFS pros and cons
Some of the benefits and drawbacks of NTFS and ReFS are illustrated in the information below.
Benefits of NTFS:
- Widely available file system.
- Volume size limit of 256TB.
- Stable since it s been around for years.
- BitLocker encryption.
- Access control list and file IDs.
- File compression.
- Removable storage support.
- Removable media as the boot drive.
Drawbacks of NTFS:
- Self-repair error feature is not supported.
- Block clone and Sparse VDL support are not supported.
- File-level snapshots are not supported.
- Offline drive access is not supported.
The following are ReFS’s benefits and drawbacks:
Benefits of ReFS
- Volume size limit of 1YB.
- Maximum file size 16EB.
- Self-repairing error support.
- Data corruption avoidance support.
- Offline drive access.
- BitLocker encryption.
- Block clone and Sparse VDL support.
- File-level snapshots support.
Drawbacks of ReFS
- Not widely available.
- Not completely stable.
- File system compression is not supported.
- Removable media boot is not supported.
When Microsoft will make the Resilient File System the operating system’s default file system is unknown. The business may have intentions to save the feature for Windows 12, even though the file system seems better integrated into the most recent release of Windows 11.