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NTFS has gained support for a few features over the years, but it wasn't meant to evolve, much. Microsoft knew what they wanted from the filesystem and they wr
by naikrovek 3y ago
NTFS has gained support for a few features over the years, but it wasn't meant to evolve, much. Microsoft knew what they wanted from the filesystem and they wrote it to spec very early in its life.
ReFS on Windows is where the changes are coming to. finally a 1st party filesystem which supports Copy on Write file cloning. a lot of core features of NTFS aren't supported on ReFS, so it's clearly not intended to be a replacement for NTFS.
- babypuncher 3y agoWindows recently got support for booting from ReFS volumes, so it seems like Microsoft has started working on it again and maybe does think a move away from NTFS is possible in the future.
- naikrovek 3y agountil ReFS supports compression, encryption, quotas, OneDrive support, and whatever else is missing, NTFS isn't going anywhere. they're gonna live side by side for 30+ years. they are meant for different uses.
- chiph 3y agoThe recent interview with Dave Cutler mentioned this briefly. When the Cairo team was working on their object file system, they had no requirement to maintain backwards compatibility (which makes sense for new development). But they didn't build in a way to have in-place upgrades after it would have been released, either. The Tukwila team, still working with the old codebase, had a rule that NTFS could be upgraded, but it had to either accept the old file system structures, or be upgraded in-place. And their code allowed for that. Relevant portion starts at about 2:10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsQBKkPj5Nc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsQBKkPj5Nc