Post by Chris Mellor (thank you) over at El Reg. Have also a look on this post for more information
As reported this past fortnight, Microsoft’s new Storage Spaces for Windows 8 is only half the story; the operating system builder is also throwing in a new Resilient File System(ReFS) while retaining most NTFS features and semantics.
Storage Spaces is a Windows 8 feature that enables a PC user to aggregate physical disk drives into a storage pool from which virtual drives are carved out; these imaginary disks then benefit from self-healing data integrity features. Storage Spaces is aimed at client PCs using NTFS. ReFS is designed for servers, but will be adapted for clients so it can be ultimately used across both system classes.
ReFS, which was co-designed with Storage Spaces, is expected to cope with much greater scale than NTFS, and data is verified and auto-corrected using checksums, just like Storage Spaces. In fact it aims to be resilient end-to-end when used in conjunction with Storage Spaces.
The new filesystem, unveiled by Windows development boss Surendra Verma, will feature:
- Checksums to test the integrity of metadata – which are records describing each file such as the creation time and date.
- Optional data integrity checksums
- Allocate-on-write transactional model to avoid losing data during a crash
- Large volume, file and directory sizes
- Storage pooling and virtualisation
- Data striping for performance (bandwidth can be managed) and redundancy for fault tolerance
- Disk scrubbing for protection against latent disk errors
- Resiliency to corruptions
- Shared storage pools across machines for additional failure tolerance and load balancing
Software doesn’t need to do anything special to use the new filesystem: the blog states “data stored on ReFS is accessible through the same file access APIs on clients that are used on any operating system that can access today’s NTFS volumes”.
Read on here
Storage CH Blog 