Windows 8’s ReFS Won’t Initially Support Boot

Windows 8, the new platform version from Microsoft, is bound to arrive on devices this year with a series of appealing new features inside, including a new file system, called ReFS. 

The Resilient File System is a newly developed feature that will arrive in both Windows Server 8 and in the Windows 8 client. 

Based on NTFS, it should deliver increased reliability, support for large volume, file and directory sizes, better security and the like. 

Moreover, it will go along nicely with Storage Spaces, another feature new to Windows 8. Storage pooling and virtualization are supported by both of them. 

One thing that it will not offer in the beginning will be support for boot. Surendra Verma, development manager on the Storage and File System team, explains that only storage will be supported when the new file system debuts in Windows 8. 

“With this in mind, we will implement ReFS in a staged evolution of the feature: first as a storage system for Windows Server, then as storage for clients, and then ultimately as a boot volume,” he says.

“This is the same approach we have used with new file systems in the past,” Surendra Verma also notes. He also says that ReFS is one of the features of Windows 8 that needed a conservative approach to initial deployment and testing.

The initial focus will be on running ReFS as a file server. “We expect customers to benefit from using it as a file server, especially on a mirrored Storage Space. We also plan to work with our storage partners to integrate it with their storage solutions,” he says. 

Apparently, initial tests have showed encouraging results. ReFS has been tested using the tens of thousands of tests developed for NTFS, Verma explains.

“These tests simulate and exceed the requirements of the deployments we expect in terms of stress on the system, failures such as power loss, scalability, and performance,” he says. 

“We do not characterize ReFS in Windows 8 as a ‘beta’ feature. It will be a production-ready release when Windows 8 comes out of beta, with the caveat that nothing is more important than the reliability of data.”

This is the first version of a new major file system, which means that caution is necessary. However, Microsoft expects ReFS – along with Storage Spaces - to become the foundation of storage on Windows for the next several years or decades. 

“Together, Storage Spaces and ReFS have been architected with headroom to innovate further, and we expect that we will see ReFS as the next massively deployed file system,” Surendra Verma concludes.

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