NTFS turns 30 years old today! I hear it's still in use by some crufty old legacy operating systems 😁
As a full time desktop Linux user since 1999 (the actual year of the Linux desktop, I swear) I wish all you Windows folks the best of luck on the next clean install 👍
...and Happy 30th Birthday "New Technology" File System!
How do you know when someone uses linux?
Don't worry, they'll tell you
We have extra time to diss Windows since we don’t have to wait for our OS to reboot all the fucking time.
Haven't used windows in a while huh?
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.
I have extra time because I don't waste my time on making up arguments!
And boy do you guys ever talk about Windows... Like constantly. Go on any Linux subreddit or community and 8 of the top 10 posts will mention Windows.
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.
The last update to NTFS was in 2004.
The fact that ReFS doesn't even support all the features NTFS does is pathetic.
Genuine question, not being sarcastic.
What’s the benefit to the average end user to modernizing NTFS?
Sure, I love having btrfs on my NAS for all the features it brings, but I’m not a normal person. What significant changes that would affect your average user does NTFS require to modernize it?
I just see it as an “if it’s not broken” type thing. I can’t say I’ve ever given the slightest care about what filesystem my computer was running until I got into NAS/backups, which itself was a good 10 years after I got into building PCs. The way I see it, it doesn’t really matter when I’m reinstalling every few years and have backups elsewhere.
I'd add better built in multi-device support and recovery (think RAID and drive pooling) but that might be beyond the "average" user (which is always a vague term and I feel there are many types of users within that average). E.g. users that mod their games can benefit from snapshots and/or reflink copies allowing to make backups of their game dirs without taking up any additional space beyond the changes that the mods add.
At the very least, better filesystem level compression support. A somewhat common usecase might be people who use emulators. Both Wii U and PS3 are consoles where major emulators just use a folder on your filesystem. I know a lot of emulator users who are non-technical to the point that they don't have "show hidden files and folders" enabled.
Also your average person wouldn't necessarily need checksums, but having them built into the filesystem would lead to overall more reliability.
You'd think it'd be ready... Weren't they been developing it for like a decade?
Unbelievably, Windows still has a ridiculously short filepath length limit.
Nope, long paths are supported since 8.1 or 10 person bit you have to enable it yourself because very old apps can break
Furthermore, apps using the unicode versions of functions (which all apps should be doing for a couple decades now) have 32kb maximum character length paths.
That’s not an NTFS issue. That’s a Windows issue.
That's not even a Windows issue, that's an issue with specific Win32 API.
Are you writing parahraphs for folder/file names? That's one "issue" I never had problem with.
Maybe enterprises need a solution for it but that's a very different use case from most end users.
Improvements are always welcome but saying it's "ridiculously short" makes the problem sound worse than it is.
I think they mean the full path length. As in you can't nest folders too deep or the total path length hits a limit. Not individual folder name limits.
You want your filesystems to be old and stable. It's new filesystems you want to view with suspicion.. not battle tested.
I wouldn't really say so. Of course it's not a good idea take the absolutely latest system as your daily driver since it's propably not bugproof yet but also you don't want to use something extremely old just because it's been tested much more because then you're just trading away perfomance and features for nothing. For example ext4 is extremely reliable and the stable version is 15year newer than NTFS.
I'm a client-side technician working in a predominantly Windows environment for the last 8 going on 9 years.
Out of all the issues I have seen on Windows, filesystem issues is rather low on that list as far as prevalence, as I don't recall one that's not explainable by hardware failure or interrupted write. Not saying it doesn't happen and that ext4 is bad or anything, but I don't work in Linux all that much so me saying that I never had an issue with ext4 isn't the same because I don't have nearly the same amount of experience.
Also ext came about in 1992, so 31 years so far to hash out the bugs is no small amount of time. Especially in terms of computing.
I read it as NFTS and was very confused for a minute.
NFTS: you invest all of your data into it, and it grows and grows until it suddenly disappears as you discover it was a scam all along.
Can it die now? ZFS all the things!
What the hell ever happened with ReiserFS (or whatever it was called?) It was supposed to be used in Vista, and then just never was.
It's primary write and maintainer killed his wife and went to prison. The fs stagnated after that.
oh, you mean MurderFS?
What's the difference from XFS?
XFS is more like ext3 or ext4 than zfs. It has now COW, snapshots, although it is very performant and can handle very large volumes. It's a pretty good all around filesystem. I trust it more than ext4, but you also can't shrink it, like you can ext4.
It is weird to me that Microsoft hasn't updated the file system in so long. They were going to with Longhorn/VIsta but that failed and it seems like they've been gunshy ever since.
You don’t sound like you weren't around the Windows Vista/Longhorn development days when they promised a successor to NTFS and then over the course of the next couple of years, would bail on that (and nearly every other promise made).
WinFS: https://www.zdnet.com/article/bill-gates-biggest-microsoft-product-regret-winfs/
And FWIW, they are developing ReFS, which looks like it will finally supplant NTFS, but given MS’ business model, don’t expect NTFS to ever really disappear.
Yeah, I definitely was. I think that gave them PTSD or something because they haven't even tried to make moderate changes to NTFS since. And besides ReFS which I hadn't heard about until this thread, they haven't even done something as minor as give you an option to use different file systems like ext4.
NTFS has evolved over the years, but the base structure is mostly unchanged. Things have changed, but not the name. I think they've been using NTFS v3 for a while now...
Yeah, that’s what I mean. There have been small changes, but nothing major and if the other poster was right, even minor changes haven’t been made since 2004.
Meanwhile Apple has come out with APFS and *nix variants have multiple file systems, each more modern than NTFS.
It is weird to me. Here’s hoping reFS or some other file system comes out.
It is weird to me that Microsoft hasn’t updated the file system in so long.
Honest question: why? NTFS isn't great, it isn't terrible, it's functional. I don't really spend any time thinking about my filesystem. I like having symbolic links on my Linux boxes, but aside from that I just want it to work, and NTFS does.
NTFS has symbolic links as well, I use them all the time
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/mklink
Honest answer: it's fragile. There are many cases of media durability being an issue and there will be going into the future. Adding a layer of ecc in the fs goes a long way.
WinFS wasn't a replacement of NTFS as much as it was a supplement. Documents could be broken apart into atomic pieces, like an embedded image and that would be indexed on its own. Those pieces were kept in something more like a SQL database, more like using binary blobs in SharePoint Portal, but that database still was written to the disk on an NTFS partition as I recall. WinFS was responsible for bringing those pieces back together to represent a compete document if you were transferring it to a non-WinFS filesystem or transferring to a different system altogether. It wasn't a new filesystem as much as it was a database with a filesystem driver.
I use both. I like Linux better, even more since W10. It's spyware, crap, all those nasty things. But hey, I'm a pc gamer and, sadly enough, my games (80% of them) all get funcky in Linux (wine, playonlinux,... I tried it all), so guess I'm stuck with the crap. But again, Linux is far better and superior
I miss defragging…
😂😂 why?
The pretty visualization in win95 was kinda great. Really good colors. Graphic design may have peaked in 1994.
For me - It was comforting to know that I have a magic tool that I can run that makes my PC faster.
How old is ext4?
15 years.
Modern Linux systems are slowly moving toward Btrfs at least... which is pretty young compared to ext4 and Ntfs.
XFS, the default filesystem in Red Hat, is older than NTFS. Released 1994.
I'll say this, the previous admin of one of the Linux servers I support set up RAID-0 striping for the main data slice (must have been dropped on their head as a child or something). Two drives, and one of the drives developed bad sectors, but I was still able to recover 95% of the data before it shit the bed completely. So, XFS is apparently quite resilient, or I got lucky.
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.
there is an open source btrfs kernel driver for it and a userspace one for ext4
Not Terribly Fast System
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.
can you boot from that ?
Using WinFs at the moment on almost all my drives. Should be the default.
Isn't WinFS unfinished?
yea its dead I think lol
I heard rumours of Windows 12 moving away from NTFS(I assume keeping it as a legacy option).
What are they moving to?
ReFS allegedly
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.
Isn't that the FS that constantly needs to be defragged? Do people still do that?
Not manually. Windows does it automatically if you have an HDD and defragging an SSD is bad
Pretty sure that was FAT. Whatever the case, you don't need to defeag modern windows anymore
There are FS that don't need defragmenting?
Supposedly the ext file systems commonly used in Linux don’t need defrag.