[Solved] Bad News: ReFS support in W8-1 Client is crippled

Probably ReFS support will be fixed in Windows 9.

 

The regfile doesn't help =( files are already in system folders.
But !
You can format with the dvd/usb in recovery mode from a command prompt, then windows will automatically mount ReFS partitions.

Code:

format /fs:refs /Q X:

I think MS wants only Raid drives to be formatted in ReFS

 

ReFS was developed for Windows Storage Spaces with multiple disks and not necessarily the same size disks either (as opposed to RAID volumes, where there disks are usually the same size).

@ moderate - Do you need some specific feature of ReFS?

NTFS actually has more usable "features" and is much easier to recover data from.

 

What I meant is that if you don't use WSS, maybe you can use it in raid, but no on single drive, I don't know... maybe they want us to use only with WSS pool now
When you try to format from windows, it says that ReFS is not supported on that drive, so it's intended.

 

Which features are you talking about? As far as I know, REFS is much more reliable and not slower as NTFS. I think there is no reason, not to choose REFS for your data-partition even on a workstation.

 

If it ain't broke...

NTFS may be over 20 years old, but it's a veeeeeeery good file system. It was very much ahead of its time and was designed to be both extensible (e.g., look at how EFS was later added to it) and future-proof.

There's a reason we still use FAT32 (or something similar like exFAT): because there are trade-offs. Going from FAT to a modern file system like NTFS (yes, NTFS is still modern) gives you more features, but also increases the complexity, the amount of code needed to support it, the overhead, etc., so FAT still exists for use in many scenarios.

Don't automatically think that "newer is better". There are always tradeoffs, and ReFS is not better than NTFS--it's missing a bunch of things that NTFS could do.

(I did a comparative study of various file systems when I was in college. Most "new" file systems are really just minor tweaks of each other. Far better to just do iterative improvements to NTFS as Microsoft has done over the years than to throw it all out for some crazy white elephant idea like that idiotic project that they had back for Longhorn.)

 

any fix?

 

No, use recovery mode:

 

Can the Windows bootloader load wims/isos from a refs drive?

 

The bigger advantage FAT32 (and even FAT) has has to do with smaller partition and drive sizes (by smaller, I mean 1 GB or less) and certain drive types (flash drives) that are commonplace in the smaller sizes.

However, above 1 GB, neither FAT or FAT32 has any advantage over NTFS - things get flipped at that barrier.

The "idiotic project" (an object-oriented filesystem) actually predates NTFS, and had its roots in HPFS (the High Performance File System) from the original (jointly IBM and Microsoft) OS/2. However, even ReFS is of little use on the desktop, and especially not for bootable partitions, as the point of efficiency for ReFS is too LARGE compared to common partition OR drive sizes for desktops. (When did the use of NTFS in NT take off, despite it being the default from the beginning? It only took off when both common drive sizes and common PARTITION sizes obsolesced FAT/FAT32 - basically, when the 2.1 GB barrier became too constricting. That was when even the die-hards that insisted on staying with FAT and FAT32 - remember, until XP, any version of NT could boot a FAT partition - woke up and smelled the coffee.) Servers and NAS have a use for ReFS; their drive and partition sizes - mostly due to use of RAID - can grow to the NTFS partition ceiling with little difficulty. However, such is not common on desktops - even in the most capacious tower cases - or even with desktop NAS and desktop SANs, RAID or no RAID. Notice that I didn't say that is impossible - I know better. However, it is highly improbable still, due to expense.)

That's why I'm waiting for Server 2012R2 to leak. First off, it will support ReFS natively - for storage spaces, not boot partitions - and you can also create ReFS-based VHDs. Second, the hardware requirements are identical to that of Server 2008R2 and Server 2012, and Windows 7/8; in some areas (Hyper-V, for example), the requirements are less restrictive - not more. However, the biggest benefits (from what I've seen) of Server 2012R2 will belong to the server-OS-as-workstation-OS crowd - and support of ReFS is actually among the smallest of advantages there. One thing that the server-OS-as-workstation-OS crowd pioneered is stripping Windows Server of services not needed by workstation/desktop users. Here's the trick of Server 2012R2 (and, to a lesser extent, Server 2012 itself) - there's far less need to strip anything. Both Server 2012 and 2012R2 are scarily efficient in terms of CPU horsepower usage - in fact, outside of gaming use, both are actually more efficient than Windows 8 or 8.1. That scary efficiency and capability breadth lend itself to a new use for the server-OS-powered workstation - the hybrid. That IS something that has been in demand, and for years; the closest outside of Windows to a hybrid OS has been - amusingly - OS X, with PC-BSD a close second. The new features of Server 2012R2 actually play more into the hybrid role - though a lot are also useful for more general-purpose servers, hybrid servers are more likely to leverage them.

 

I'm using ReFS on 14TBs, originally created in Windows 2012 Server, I like the file and metadata checksumming, to make sure my files do not become corrupt (and I have backups if they do.) Just a tip for people who use ReFS, formatting with: "format drive:\ /q /fs:ReFS /I:enable" will enable file checksumming and copy-on-write to go with the default metadata checksumming/copy-on-write. It slows performance but is nice for data integrity.