Storage Basics: NTFS Today, ReFS Tomorrow

While the details have changed fairly dramatically, PCs still interact with storage devices–hard drives, solid state storage (SSD), USB memory keys, and the like–the same as they ever have. That is, to enable the use of storage, the devices must be formatted with a filesystem and then assigned a drive letter so that Windows, or the apps and applications that run within this environment, can access their contents.

And go figure, FAT lives on today with a version of the system called exFAT that is used almost exclusively on flash storage devices.

Over the years, Microsoft’s filesystem technologies have evolved dramatically, first with MS‑DOS–based filesystems built around the FAT (file allocation table) architecture that debuted in Microsoft Stand‑Alone Disk BASIC way back in 1977. Originally designed for 5.25‑inch floppy disks, FAT was evolved over the years to support different floppy disk formats and then hard drives of ever‑increasing sizes.

When Windows NT debuted in 1993, it included a new filesystem called NTFS that had numerous advantages over the FAT‑based filesystems Microsoft was still using in then‑mainstream Windows versions. Without getting into the technical details, suffice it to say that it was more reliable, efficient, manageable, and, eventually even offered better performance though that certainly wasn’t true of the first few versions. It also supported much bigger storage devices than the FAT filesystems.

With Windows XP in 2001, Microsoft made NTFS the default filesystem for its OS, and in the intervening years, this filesystem has been regularly updated with new features and functionality, including support for encryption, quotas, file versioning, and much more. And in Windows 8, NTFS is still the default filesystem for storage devices, especially hard disks and SSDs. But that’s all about to change.

Concurrently with Windows 8, Microsoft developed a new filesystem that will one day replace NTFS. Dubbed the Resilient File System, or ReFS, this new filesystem is currently available only in Windows Server 2012, and then only for the file server workload. Moving forward, however, Microsoft will extend ReFS first to work elsewhere in Windows Server, including as a boot disk. And it will then move ReFS to the Windows client as well.

Microsoft has not yet revealed how or when that could happen. So it’s equally possible that ReFS support will debut in a future Windows 8 service pack or other update, or that it will simply be included in Windows 9.

Compared to NTFS, ReFS is an evolution, not a brand‑new filesystem. So it retains complete compatibility with NTFS while offering automatic data correction and support for even larger partition/disk, file, and folder sizes, among other things. ReFS also works with the storage features discussed in this chapter, including Storage Spaces.

For now, just know that you will be using the NTFS filesystem almost exclusively in Windows 8 when it comes to large capacity storage devices like hard drives and SSDs, even though it’s possible in some cases to format them with FAT‑based filesystems.