Microsoft is quietly adding support for ReFS to Windows 11. That’s not new. ReFS was introduced with Windows Server 2012. ReFS is the abbreviation for Resilient File System.
It is a proprietary file system developed by Microsoft. It’s been around for ten years now. Microsoft states that its goal is to “maximize data availability, scale efficiently to large datasets across diverse workloads, and ensure data integrity with resilience to corruption.” »
To achieve this, this advance improves certain features of the NTFS file system, but also removes some. We therefore have major differences between the two file systems.
The ReFS, the highlights
For example, ReFS can handle file and volume sizes up to 35 petabytes, with NTFS being limited to 256 terabytes. A petabyte is equal to 1024 terabytes. ReFS is characterized by exclusive features such as block clone, sparse VDL, mirror-accelerated parity or file-level snapshots.
Block Clone converts physical file copy operations into logical operations. This advance results in faster processing and a reduction in system resource requirements, particularly on the I/O (input/output) side.
In the same vein, Sparse VDL reduces the creation time of fixed virtual disks. Mirror-accelerated parity, in turn, ensures high performance and capacity-efficient storage, while file-level snapshots allow the creation of a new file with the data and attributes of a source file.
Wikipedia clarifies that ReFS does not support named streams, object IDs, 8.3 filenames, NTFS compression, Encrypting File System (EFS), transactional NTFS, hard links, extended attributes, and disk quotas. Finally, Windows cannot be booted from a ReFS volume.
Windows 11 and ReFS.
This addition of ReFS was done discreetly, so some information is unknown. The discovery was made by a version Windows 11 Professional. However, ReFS may only be possible with certain editions. For example, we can name the Enterprise, Education and Workstation editions.
Note that there is no tool to convert an NTFS format unit to ReFS. This means you must select ReFS during initial disk configuration. To enable support, you need to use ViVeTool utility ID42189933. This only affects Windows 11 previews released as part of the Windows Insider Program.