This might sound ignorant but that’s cause I am. Why doesn’t windows just use ext4, btrfs, XFS, or something open source. They wouldn’t have to worry about developing it so it’d be a load off their chest and they could get really good features that even NTFS doesn’t have. Well maybe not with ext4 but with btrfs
Microsoft really really hated open source some time ago. Now they seem to have embraced it, however some still think that might be an attempt to EEE.
Still, I suppose Microsoft doesn’t think replacing the Windows default filesystem is a sound investment at this point even if the political resistance to such a change is, supposedly, gone.
I can't believe Microsoft is still using this piece of crap filesystem. If they had a CoW filesystem they could even paper over the mess that is Windows Update without having to actually fix it, they could save petabytes of storage over the world and significantly improve reliability all in one go. Let's not even mention how NTFS is amazingly slow on hard drives, manages to fragment to hell and back without doing anything, requires offline repairs like it was FAT32 and its compression barely does anything while massively slowing down the computer.
Yet here I am envying btrfs, APFS, ZFS and even fucking XFS for their reflinks and CoW.
In fact, not even WSL uses a modern FS, I think Microsoft is allergic to modern FSs.
None of these problems are really dealbreakers for a consumer-oriented file system in 2023. Not even ext4 supports CoW. Now that everyone boots off an SSD, things like file fragmentation no longer matter, and most of NTFS' continued slowness has more to do with Windows itself than the actual file system.
ReFS is Microsoft's new file system meant for more advanced use cases. It supports many but not all of these advanced features. Starting with Windows 11, you can actually boot off a ReFS drive, though I'm not sure that is a recommended configuration.
ReFS still is not supported for use as a boot (C:) drive, but it’s used extensively in enterprise environments for VHD storage and as a backup target.
Snapshotting and merging is much faster because of “Fast Cloning.” It also has something called “integrity streams” which can be used to tell if data has been corrupted.
I don’t understand this all at a deep level, but it seems promising.
Stuff shouldn’t include temporal or subjective aspects in their name like New Technology File System, Grand Unified Bootloader… that’s all I got but you get the idea.
Does NTFS allow for merging of disks into a single partition? Apple was able to do this by combing a larger HDD with a smaller SSD into a single virtual HFS+ volume.
Yep. You need to convert the disk into a “dynamic disk” (no data loss btw) and then you can create a “spanned volume” across the disks. You can also create a striped volume for performance, which is basically RAID 0.
But apparently dynamic disks are now deprecated and Microsoft wants you to use “storage spaces” instead, which is basically RAID and not just simple spanned volumes. The problem with this, IIRC, is that you’ll need at least two extra drives (in addition to the drive where Windows is installed).
I don’t think a spanned volume is quite what they were after. I’m pretty sure macOS uses the SSD part as a cache and it’s used mainly for increasing the performance of the relatively slow but large capacity HDD. Nowadays though you might as well just go with all SSD in most cases if performance matters.
Yes, NTFS lacks features that surely one of the many Linux filesystems have. But it also has features others do not. There is no one-siize-fits-all filesystem.
Ext4 is generally faster than NTFS, but cannot handle as large of files
ZFS has a multitude of features that NTFS does not, like zraid, dedup, etc., but usually at the cost of RAM.
BTRFS is included in the Linux kernel and also has many features, like being able to conveniently switch hard drive raid-like configurations on the fly with rebalance, but doesn’t support fs-level encryption
NTFS lacks in many features the others do not, and is a “non-standard” filesystem. However, it’s one of the few with better cross-platform support, more advanced access control, pre-emptive journaling, reparse points, etc.
It’s quite obvious that my calling out tribalism has felt to you an attack.
We get enough of this “us vs them” mentality in literally every topic and medium. I’d just like a little more nuance and genuine discourse. So I apologize if I’ve offended you.
If you want to refute that then it’s most likely you have just had some unlucky experience, and at best it’s anecdotal.
Considering your rather disingenuous second sentence, I can see that you are not here to engage in conversation, but to troll. You’re exactly what nobody needs buddy. Cya.
Very slow, still needs defragmented, proprietary, (I know a lot of people don’t care about that but also a lot feel that proprietary software is malware) and is so unbelievably slow on hard drives. I know I said slow twice but god damn on a hard drive it’s rough. I know just get an SSD but I have a 2TB hard drive I keep my games on. It used to be on NTFS so I could dual-boot and not download a game twice but once I left windows I put ext4 on it and it helps a bit.
I have a 2TB HDD that was ntfs and now ext4 as well. I can't say I've noticed a difference, but I didn't do any benchmarking either.
I wouldn't consider ntfs as malware like I would something like anticheat software. As far as I know ntfs doesn't intentionally or negligently harm, open a system to harm, or perform tasks that have nothing to do with the designed function.
Drefragging sucks I guess, but it had to be run so infrequently. I can certainly understand why someone would want to move onto something that removed the need for it.
When I swapped from l windows to linux my at the 12+ year old pc went from needing like 15 minutes from boot to load the web browser. Linux mint cut that down to 1 minute. yes i cleaned my disk and defrag it regularly. Just less bloat and better fs
Nothing inherently wrong with NTFS itself as a filesystem besides being proprietary, and Microsoft supplies absolutely no support for using it in Linux. All the work done to get it running in Linux has been from the ground up and it shows. Many times I’ve had a hiccup on my external drives and they completely lock up until they’re repaired on a windows machine. Unfortunately NTFS is one of the only journaled file system that works on both Windows, Apple, and Linux.
There has also been a lot of advances for filesystems like checksumming so you know when you get bitrot. Or copy-on-write which can take snapshots of a file and then further changes are stored as the difference. You can then rollback to any snapshot you’ve taken.
Edit: Just to clarify, I run ALOT of operating systems in my lab; RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu (several LTS flavors), TruNAS, Unraid, RancherOS, ESXi, Windows 2003 thru 2022, Windows 10, Windows 11.
My latest headless Steam box with Windows 11 based on a AMD 5600g basically reboots about as fast as I can retype my password in RDP.
Probably a gaming PC (as he mentioned Steam) without a display connected to it that’s used for game streaming using Parsec or other software like Sunshine. By the way, if you want to try that setup yourself make sure you get a dummy plug (HDMI or DisplayPort) for the GPU as Windows doesn’t really allow video capture if no display is detected.
Comment by someone who hasn’t used Windows in an age. When was the last time you rebooted because you had installed new software? When was the last time you ran random code from a forum post to make software work? Because this windows user doesn’t remember ever doing that.
*nix systems are not immune to needing reboots after updates. I work as an escalation engineer for an IT support firm and our support teams that do *nix updates without reboots have DEFINATELY been the cause of some hard to find issues. We’ll often review environment changes first thing during an engagement only to fix the issue to find that it was from some update change 3 months ago where the team never rebooted to validate the new config was good. Not gonna argue that in general its more stable and usually requires less reboots, but its certainly not the answer to every Windows pitfall.
The only time you truly need to reboot is when you update your kernel.
The solution to this problem is live-patching. Not really a game changer with consumer electronics because they don’t have to use ECC, but with servers that can take upwards of 10 minutes to reboot, it is a game changer.
Damn yeah I didn’t think of that either. Alright, scratch what I said. The point still stands that you very rarely need to update outside of scenarios containing very critical processes such as these, those of which depend on what work you do with it.
It’s been a long slow night and morning and I was half awake when I said that. Hell I’m still half awake now, just disregard anything I’ve said.
Many Linux package managers themselves tell you you should reboot your system after updates, especially if the update has touched system packages. You can definitely run into problems that will leave you scratching your head if you don’t.
Yesterday, on one of my family members computer the Laptop speakers stopped working, after an hour of clicking through legacy Ui trying to fix it(Lenovo Yoga 730 if someone could help me) I gave up, plugged my Linux boot usb in to test if there is a driver issue or so. Miss click in the boot menu and had to wait half an hour for a random Windows update(I did not start it because I used the physical button to turn it off, with Windows 11 turning off the computer via software requires so much mouse movement).
Omg. This hits home. I think Linux has prompted / asked me to reboot one time since I installed it 2 months ago. Windows wants you to reboot everytime you change anything. I didn’t realize how insanely often it asks until I had something to compare it to.
I got a friend trying Linux for the first time and they asked for some help picking software to install, like which office suite or photo app etc… They just instinctively rebooted after everything they did like it was a pavlovian response, lol.
This will vary by distro. Arch for example expects (but doesn’t ask) you to reboot quite often since their packages are “bleeding edge” and update the kernel often.
Btrfs FTW. EXT 4 is also pretty darn good. Windows is a joke not a good fit for my use cases and has privacy issues about many others. I just it very occasionally but mostly run Arch Linux for my needs. Windows Games are running better under WINE/Proton than native in Windows often now.
The only reason why I am running Linux and Windows in dual boot is because of Valorant and the Office 365 suite. Otherwise I would already be done with Windows. Linux is just amazing.
i’m confused… are you talking about ext4, xfs, zfs…? because these are the filesystems linux people talk about and these are also the filesystems that run the worlds databases and data storage systems
en.wikipedia.org
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