ReFS is out. But only specific revisions of Windows, notably Windows server, can use it for specific use cases.

I tried setting up ReFS on a disk for a cluster of hyper-v systems… I couldn’t because they were using a cluster shared DAS, and in that version of Windows server or ReFS there was no support for cluster access to the FS, it should have otherwise worked, it just seems a bit incomplete at the moment. If I had been using it for cifs access for a single server, then yeah, it probably would have been fine, it was just the clustered direct access that wasn’t yet supported.

Windows desktop is unlikely to get ReFS support until the fs is more mature, and it’s likely that will be limited to non-os disks for a while.

It’s pretty far along right now, it’s just that MS isn’t going to pop open any Champaign until the fs can hold its own as a direct replacement and upgrade from NTFS, with all the capabilities and features required (and more).

I’ll note that the vast majority of systems running some kind of *nix are generally using either ext2 or ext3. Where ext3 is essentially just ext2 with journaling (which is something NTFS has, AFAIK), and ext2 is just as old as NTFS.

We can argue and complain all we want, but these are tried and true, battle tested file systems that do the job adequately for the demands of systems, both in the past, and now. They do one fairly simple thing… Organizing data on disk into files and directories, and enabling that data to be written, updated, read from, and otherwise retrieved when needed.

I know in IT we don’t go by the saying “if it’s not broken don’t fix it”, since all of us have horror stories of when you don’t fix something that’s not broken and something very bad happens… But I would say that systems like ext2/3 and NTFS have achieved the coveted goal of RFC 1925, rule 12: In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

There’s no fat in these file systems. Everything in them generally exists for good reason, the fs is stable and does the required job.

Does that mean we should pack it up, we’ll never need another fs again? Absolutely not. We will hit the hard upper limits of what these file systems can do, eventually; probably fairly soon, but that doesn’t mean that either is bad simply because they are old.