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The Resilient File System (ReFS) is Microsoft’s newest file system, designed to maximize data availability, scale efficiently to large data sets across diverse workloads, and provide data integrity by means of resiliency to corruption. It seeks to address an expanding set of storage scenarios and establish a foundation for future innovations.

Key benefits

Resiliency

ReFS introduces new features that can precisely detect corruptions and also fix those corruptions while remaining online, helping provide increased integrity and availability for your data:

  • Integrity-streams – ReFS uses checksums for metadata and optionally for file data, giving ReFS the ability to reliably detect corruptions.
  • Storage Spaces integration – When used in conjunction with a mirror or parity space, ReFS can automatically repair detected corruptions using the alternate copy of the data provided by Storage Spaces. Repair processes are both localized to the area of corruption and performed online, requiring no volume downtime.
  • Salvaging data – If a volume becomes corrupted and an alternate copy of the corrupted data doesn’t exist, ReFS removes the corrupt data from the namespace. ReFS keeps the volume online while it handles most non-correctable corruptions, but there are rare cases that require ReFS to take the volume offline.
  • Proactive error correction – In addition to validating data before reads and writes, ReFS introduces a data integrity scanner, known as a scrubber. This scrubber periodically scans the volume, identifying latent corruptions and proactively triggering a repair of corrupt data.

The following features are only available on ReFS:

Functionality ReFS NTFS
Block clone Yes No
Sparse VDL Yes No
Real-time tier optimization Yes (on Storage Spaces Direct) No

 

The following features are unavailable on ReFS at this time:

Functionality ReFS NTFS
File system compression No Yes
File system encryption No Yes
Data Deduplication No Yes
Transactions No Yes
Hard links No Yes
Object IDs No Yes
Short names No Yes
Extended attributes No Yes
Disk quotas No Yes
Bootable No Yes
Supported on removable media No Yes
NTFS storage tiers No Yes