No more ReFS outside of the Workstation?

[themctipers]

5 hours ago, Jito463 said:

I've had several WD's fail on me, but I've not had a single one of my four Hitachi/HGST (which is now part of WD) give me any issues.  And I've most of them for many years.  One even has 5 years, 7 hours of 24/7/365 run time (43,807 hours), while another has been running for 7 years, 3 months, 4 days and 1 hour (65,377 hours).  The other two are only 1-2 years old, but no errors there, either.

 

Quite frankly, either you just happen to be getting some bad drives - which is possible - or there's some other contributing factor causing them to fail (power fluctuations, heat, etc).

the conditions my hard drives are in are terrible:

sometimes they drop when my pc is on, like twice a year

idle is 40c, load is 50c

barely any airflow

im using $25 PSU with these

 

the drives ive had were all pretty old, 2011, 2007, 2008, and now my 2009 1tb wd black is on its last legs

the 2011/2007 ones were running ~50k hours, the 2008/9 one was running ~15k hours

[themctipers]

3 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

So what, i have a 200GB WD that has 10+ bad sectors but its still kicking...  BTW i think the problem is on your side because aside from that old geezer none of my HDD's have bad sectors(2x4TB WD Red, 1TB WD Green, 3TB WD Green, 2TB Samsung, 4x10TB Seagate Ironwolf[these are the newest ATM])...

Its pretty dumb to store important data on only one drive and place. At least run a RAID1 array with HDD/SSD + 1 offline backup.

i need my drives to not crash and burn, i dont have any backup service, only a 3tb drive i just keep unplugged 

 

am not in a position to buy new drives, running raid on multiple dying/dead drives sounds stupid

 

[themctipers]

1 hour ago, vorticalbox said:

if you're using Linux why would you be using ntfs? 

 

How does ReFS stack up against zfs on Linux? 

i have windows too, and mac

need that support, using fat32 is just wrong and exfat isn't supported in my distro 

[themctipers]

1 hour ago, Drak3 said:

Compatibility.

Could you elaborate further? Sounds like either user error or something somewhere got corrupted.

was transfering files over, through USB 3 on a USB 3 to sata adapter

it finished, i checked to see if it was there, the folder was inaccessible

on linux it was there, just copied it over to another folder and deleted the original, windows saw it

[Drak3]

Just now, themctipers said:

was transfering files over, through USB 3 on a USB 3 to sata adapter

it finished, i checked to see if it was there, the folder was inaccessible

on linux it was there, just copied it over to another folder and deleted the original, windows saw it

Did you try refreshing the device? Any time I've had that issue, it was simply the containing folder/drive not being refreshed automatically.

[themctipers]

Just now, Drak3 said:

Did you try refreshing the device? Any time I've had that issue, it was simply the containing folder/drive not being refreshed automatically.

unplugged / repugging didn't work, used safe eject

windows sees the folder, but it cannot access it 

i know that the rest of my files were ~75gb, and the folder was 5gb, and windows showed 80gb used, so i know the files were there

 

[Drak3]

Just now, themctipers said:

unplugged / repugging didn't work, used safe eject

windows sees the folder, but it cannot access it 

i know that the rest of my files were ~75gb, and the folder was 5gb, and windows showed 80gb used, so i know the files were there

 

Sounds like corrupted folder metadata or admin access was applied to it. Neither an issue unique to Windows, and typically only affects the operating systems where that data is relatively important.

[themctipers]

Just now, Drak3 said:

Sounds like corrupted folder metadata or admin access was applied to it. Neither an issue unique to Windows, and typically only affects the operating systems where that data is relatively important.

dunno, fixed it though

[NumLock21]

I tried to understand the benefits of ReFS but fail catastrophically.

ReFs removes the need to do chkdsk on files, cause it's constantly checking? Doesn't that wear drive out sooner on both HDD and especially SSDs.

 

http://bakins-bits.com/wordpress/?p=195

[Drak3]

I fail to see a reason why anyone other than Leadeater and 5 other forum members should even remotely care. It's not like ReFS is to Microsoft as APFS is to Apple. It's an fringe use case for ReFS for people running these operating systems already.

[LAwLz]

13 hours ago, leadeater said:

ReFS does support bitlocker though so that isn't really an issue, you can also use SED/FIPS disks as well.

 

Performance is also fine and even if 7% was still what the difference that's not enough to have an actual impact or to out-way the benefits. Here's a 4 SATA SSD array which achieves almost perfect scaling, that has more to do with Storage Space though.

 

Only time anyone really complains about ReFS performance is when they are using Storage Spaces parity and didn't use a journal disk for write-back caching, every parity array needs write-back caching to get decent performance even ZFS. What you're really seeing is the difference in maturity of the product and collective industry knowledge of how to use it correctly.

Well OK. Calling it "not all that great" is not really fair since there are no alternatives in the Windows space. You can't really compare ReFS vs ZFS for example without also talking about the overall Windows vs *nix discussion, and at that point the file system becomes one out of many things to take into consideration.

 

ReFS vs NTFS on a desktop or laptop though...

I mean come on. For the average Joe the choice is pretty obvious.

ReFS:

• Performs worse (even with all the parts that makes it resilient turned off and a significant difference with it turned on).
• Lacks support for Extended file attributes (which does matter if you are going to use the GNU/Linux subsystem).
• Can't be booted from.
• Can't shrink a volume while mounted (I think? Correct me if I am wrong). Might not be a big deal to most users but that one time you need it, it will be nice to have. But this is an issue with lots of file systems to be fair, and it is fairly easy to work around.
• No file system compression. Although you could argue how important that really is these days.
• Poorly support. Can't even use OneDrive with it.

And all that, for what? Preventing data rot which isn't exactly a big issue on consumer computers anyway? Not worth it.

 

It's nice for storage spaces but outside of that specific usage I don't don't see the point. Especially not now when you can't even use it on Windows 10 Pro.

[leadeater]

32 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Can't shrink a volume while mounted (I think? Correct me if I am wrong).

I don't think I've even tried to do that heh. Don't really have the need since data kinda always get bigger. Usually I delete the entire virtual disk and create a new one if I'm making it smaller and that's typically because I'm changing what it's used for etc. I also use thin provisioned virtual disks so allocated size is rather moot.

 

Also as some extra information I just tried to test it out on Windows 10 Enterprise 1607 and powershell says ReFS is not supported on this OS..... wtf.

 

Quote

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> New-Volume -DiskNumber 1 -FriendlyName Test -FileSystem Refs
New-Volume : The specified file system is not supported
Activity ID: {e6d2253a-e944-43b8-937d-4f7092b1d452}
At line:1 char:1
+ New-Volume -DiskNumber 1 -FriendlyName Test -FileSystem Refs
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [New-Volume], CimException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : StorageWMI 43001,Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure.CimCmdlets.InvokeCimMethodCommand,N
   ew-Volume

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> [environment]::OSVersion.Version

Major  Minor  Build  Revision
-----  -----  -----  --------
10     0      14393  0

 

[leadeater]

38 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Performs worse (even with all the parts that makes it resilient turned off and a significant difference with it turned on).

Actually for it's intended use case integrity on increases performance, so long as you keep enough free space on the disk. Performance degrades as free space reduces.

 

Quote

In the second part we’ll see how ReFS maintains performance and what exactly influences it. There is a common misconception, that hashsumming has a huge impact on ReFS performance, so we’re determined to show how “huge” this impact really is and what really happens. Our own bet is on FileIntegrity option, which may somehow disrupt I/O.

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/log-structured-file-systems-microsoft-refs-v2-short-insight

 

Quote

With FileIntegrity on, we observe fluctuations in free disk space, changes of sequence of commands, changes of requests, of I/O size and pattern. This means that in this mode ReFS works like a Log-Structured File System (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-structured_file_system). This sounds good for virtualization workloads, because the system transforms multiple small random writes into bigger pages, which increases performance and prevents from the “I/O blender” effect. This issue is typical for virtualization and refers to an effect of dramatic performance degradation, which results from multiple virtualized workloads being merged into a stream of random I/O. Before LSFS appeared, solving this problem came expensive. Now we have LSFS (WAFL, CASL) and, as it turned out, ReFS can help, too.

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/refs-performance

 

You just need to be aware that free space is the make or break for ReFS but that is also the same for Netapp WAFL too.