Windows 8 First Impressions

[bphlpt]

Can you add support for ReFS to Win7 in a similar manner? I assume that ReFS is what originally began as the file system that was supposed to be added to Vista but got pulled? Just curious.

Cheers and Regards

[joakim]

Can you add support for ReFS to Win7 in a similar manner? I assume that ReFS is what originally began as the file system that was supposed to be added to Vista but got pulled? Just curious.

Cheers and Regards

No I seriously doubt that.

[bphlpt]

That's a shame. If there doesn't end up being a way to add support for interacting with ReFS from Win7, I guess that might be how MS hopes to force the use of Win8 on Enterprise users, unless I misunderstand the purpose of ReFS. It will also be one of the very few file systems that Win7 does not have a way to interact with.

The other thing I was talking about was what little I've read about ReFS reminds me of WinFS, originally demonstrated by MS in 2003, planned for inclusion in Vista, and shelved in 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS I guess if Win8 is as poorly adopted in the enterprise as is anticipated, that the same fate might befall ReFS.

Cheers and Regards

[CoffeeFiend]

I guess that might be how MS hopes to force the use of Win8 on Enterprise users

Nope. You'll just access it over the network just the same. It basically changes nothing to the big picture as far as "clients" are concerned.

It's just something else you can use server-side, but I don't think it'll gain too much acceptance there anyway. It fails to implement long-awaited features like deduplication, you can't boot from it, and it removes a lot of existing features from NTFS which are actually very useful:

The NTFS features we have chosen to not support in ReFS are: named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes, and quotas.

It's not yet what most would call mature, a lot of backup solutions might not work quite right with it (or at all), it obviously doesn't work on Win8 non-server (except if you copy files and reg keys over from it), real-world performance or scalability is basically unknown at this point, etc.

Maybe the next version or ReFS in Win 9 server will be better, but for now I'd much rather have ZFS or Btrfs. Then again I don't think too many companies will buy Win 8 Server (Win 2012). Hyper-V is somewhat improved (meh), but you're stuck with Metro (yes, on a server!)