Finally, a new filesystem

[John.Murray]

I've been very unhappy with the state of current O/S filesystems; although storage capacities have increased tremendously, fault tolerance and fault recovery have not.

I've been following ZFS but since Apple dropped support for it, it has been languishing, the only real-world access for it is via network share.

With the upcoming release of Windows 8 along with some interesting, but largely forgettable ideas, MS published a fascinating article last week on their Building Windows 8 Blog:

Storage Spaces

If you think this looks a bit like ZFS, in some aspects, you'd be correct.  Windows has long support Dynamic Volumes, allowing us to have a logical drive span multiple disk, but with no regard to fault tolerance.  Storage Spaces directly deals with this issue.

Yet, with all these new capabilities, I'm still uncomfortable that the underlying issues of basic disk reliability, bit rot, SSL block-de-duplication, remain....

Enter ReFS

This directly address' many of the the issues raised.  Copy on Write prevents a nasty but suprisingly common failing of many RAID implementations (write hole, where an O/S filesystem disk write spanning disks fails), Disk scrubbing prevents disk rot and goes far beyond SMART in identifying failing disks.  Integrity Streams is fascinating, essentially transactional, high performance BIG data access, such as Video, etc.  It also eliminates the concept of disk framentation per se.

[RobSaecker]

Server only, however, at least initially. No comment on when it might be available in the consumer versions that I could see, though I didn't look very hard.

[Farmer]

Interesting indeed.  Regarding server only, it's also not bootable at this point.  But they make the point that this was also how they introduced NTFS.  If I had to hazard a guess, Window 9 before the consumer sees it (and it becomes bootable) assuming some other significant paradigm shift doesn't occur to make it redundant.

[Chris Pollock]

The sooner this new filesystem makes it onto the desktop, the better.

Data corruption is more than a theoretical possibility - over the years I've seen a handful of files on my hard disks go bad for no apparent reason, and on one memorable occasion in 2005 a huge number of files were corrupted in one hit by a bug in an nVidia SATA driver. Fortunately I had good backups, but that might not always be the case. If a file gets corrupted at the wrong time, it might get copied to your backups, leaving you without a good copy.

I was worried enough to set up a little FreeBSD server so that I could at least use ZFS for my backup copies, but that still leaves the possibility of files getting corrupted on Windows before they get backed up. (I've changed my workflow to copy my raw files from my camera directly to the FreeBSD machine, so at least they should be safe.)

ReFS on the Windows desktop would certainly help me to sleep better at night.

[John.Murray]

Desktop ZFS i here (at least for mac):

http://tenscomplement.com/our-products