4 ms·

Wait- how do you find NTFS underpowered? You make vague claims offering nothing of substance.

by fxfan 8y ago

Macha 8y ago
My experience is that NTFS is quite slow compared to ext4 on my machine (both via Windows and via ntfs-3g). Particularly for operations around large numbers of small files like moving/deleting a .git directory.
- j16sdiz 8y ago
  Core NTFS is fast. When you feel slow, it is the abstraction layers and plugable interfaces above it. - and they are API. Replacing the core won't help the performance. They need to remove some abstraction and break some application.
qalmakka 8y ago
NTFS holds up quite well when compared with more "traditional" filesystems such as XFS, ext4 and UFS (except the choppy I/O performance, but as someone else said above it might be more of an issue of the subsystems above it); it has much more functionality of almost anyone of those I mentioned above (for instance, I really don't understand why so few filesystems support transparent compression). I think that filesystems like ZFS and Btrfs are simply one step ahead than anything else, not only in features but also in tooling and UX. Send/receive, CoW snapshots, checksumming are all tremendous features that I think would fit fantastically into the Windows workflow, if Microsoft really managed to integrate them well. For instance, I think a ZFS-based Windows update would be able to do away with transactions and rely instead on datasets to snapshot the system, apply an update and rollback everything if something broke, exposing to power users the tools to clearly understand and rollback their systems themselves by hand. Obviously all of this can be achieved by rewriting everything from scratch as in house, specific platforms, but I just feel that continuing to replicate in NTFS/ReFS features other open and widely supported filesystems have had for almost a decade is just not the best way forward, and it's not really better for anyone.
- magduf 8y ago
  >(for instance, I really don't understand why so few filesystems support transparent compression). Does anyone actually use this on Windows these days? I'm guessing the reason so few filesystems support it now is because the gains aren't worth it for the types of files that take up most of the space on filesystems these days, such as video files. You can't compress x264 video with a general-purpose compression algorithm. Storage space is plentiful and cheap, and (general-purpose) compression yields little gains, and the stuff we're storing now is already compressed (images, video, audio, etc.).
  - qalmakka 8y ago
    I have LZ4 compression enabled on ZFS, and not only it perceivably improves performances on slow drives (due to the lower amount of I/O), it saves actual storage space. An average OS install on hard drive is full of things such as executables and text files which summed up can amount to several gigabytes. These files compress pretty well in my experience, and even if it only amounts to saving a few GBs, it can still be crucial on small SSDs.

Wait- how do you find NTFS underpowered? You make vague claims offering nothing of substance.

by fxfan 8y ago

Wait- how do you find NTFS underpowered? You make vague claims offering nothing of substance.

My experience is that NTFS is quite slow compared to ext4 on my machine (both via Windows and via ntfs-3g). Particularly for operations around large numbers of small files like moving/deleting a .git directory.

j16sdiz 8y ago
Core NTFS is fast. When you feel slow, it is the abstraction layers and plugable interfaces above it. - and they are API. Replacing the core won't help the performance. They need to remove some abstraction and break some application.

qalmakka 8y ago

NTFS holds up quite well when compared with more "traditional" filesystems such as XFS, ext4 and UFS (except the choppy I/O performance, but as someone else said above it might be more of an issue of the subsystems above it); it has much more functionality of almost anyone of those I mentioned above (for instance, I really don't understand why so few filesystems support transparent compression). I think that filesystems like ZFS and Btrfs are simply one step ahead than anything else, not only in features but also in tooling and UX. Send/receive, CoW snapshots, checksumming are all tremendous features that I think would fit fantastically into the Windows workflow, if Microsoft really managed to integrate them well. For instance, I think a ZFS-based Windows update would be able to do away with transactions and rely instead on datasets to snapshot the system, apply an update and rollback everything if something broke, exposing to power users the tools to clearly understand and rollback their systems themselves by hand. Obviously all of this can be achieved by rewriting everything from scratch as in house, specific platforms, but I just feel that continuing to replicate in NTFS/ReFS features other open and widely supported filesystems have had for almost a decade is just not the best way forward, and it's not really better for anyone.

magduf 8y ago
>(for instance, I really don't understand why so few filesystems support transparent compression). Does anyone actually use this on Windows these days? I'm guessing the reason so few filesystems support it now is because the gains aren't worth it for the types of files that take up most of the space on filesystems these days, such as video files. You can't compress x264 video with a general-purpose compression algorithm. Storage space is plentiful and cheap, and (general-purpose) compression yields little gains, and the stuff we're storing now is already compressed (images, video, audio, etc.).
- qalmakka 8y ago
  I have LZ4 compression enabled on ZFS, and not only it perceivably improves performances on slow drives (due to the lower amount of I/O), it saves actual storage space. An average OS install on hard drive is full of things such as executables and text files which summed up can amount to several gigabytes. These files compress pretty well in my experience, and even if it only amounts to saving a few GBs, it can still be crucial on small SSDs.