Happy 30th Birthday “New Technology” File System! Thanks for 30 years of demonstrating Linux superiority with a gap that widens with every new kernel release 👍
I heard, this commercial distribution “Windows” still uses it. But this thing just recently got a (very limited) package manger. So they seem to be very late with adapting to current technology.
package manger
current technology
How do I tell microsoft this isn’t new
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On the bright side it only very rarely destroys itself when updating. However, some very loud foss distributions do it fairly often.
It forces you to update and then works at “something something” for 5 minutes to 5 hours and then reboots and does the same thing again but after logging in, none of your applications are updated and also none of the system seems to be changed with the updates. You don’t even get proper status information during updates.
Of course it doesn’t destroy itself when it doesn’t change anything …
Oof this is only thing if you have the os on an HDD. I’ve had similar behavior on *buntu running off of an HDD.
On an sdd or nvme you’ll never have stuff like this happen.
There is an argument to be made for it being better ux to not have programs update without telling you. Winget isn’t perfect, but it can auto update your stuff if need be.
Windows Server 2022 supports hotpatching in Azure and on prem if hosted on Azure Stack HCI. Not sure if it’s coming to Windows 11 or not.
It’s good at destroying other OSs that may be installed alongside though
There’s nothing wrong with solid old file systems; ext4 is almost 17 and no one complains about it,
But that’s the problem, NTFS is not solid at all.
It’s not?
No it’s not. Ever tried grabbing it? You can’t. Must be liquid or something
What’s wrong with ntfs?
Nothing inherently wrong with NTFS itself as a filesystem besides being proprietary, and Microsoft supplies absolutely no support for using it in Linux. All the work done to get it running in Linux has been from the ground up and it shows. Many times I’ve had a hiccup on my external drives and they completely lock up until they’re repaired on a windows machine. Unfortunately NTFS is one of the only journaled file system that works on both Windows, Apple, and Linux.
There has also been a lot of advances for filesystems like checksumming so you know when you get bitrot. Or copy-on-write which can take snapshots of a file and then further changes are stored as the difference. You can then rollback to any snapshot you’ve taken.
Shadow copy.
Very slow, still needs defragmented, proprietary, (I know a lot of people don’t care about that but also a lot feel that proprietary software is malware) and is so unbelievably slow on hard drives. I know I said slow twice but god damn on a hard drive it’s rough. I know just get an SSD but I have a 2TB hard drive I keep my games on. It used to be on NTFS so I could dual-boot and not download a game twice but once I left windows I put ext4 on it and it helps a bit.
I have a 2TB HDD that was ntfs and now ext4 as well. I can’t say I’ve noticed a difference, but I didn’t do any benchmarking either.
I wouldn’t consider ntfs as malware like I would something like anticheat software. As far as I know ntfs doesn’t intentionally or negligently harm, open a system to harm, or perform tasks that have nothing to do with the designed function.
Drefragging sucks I guess, but it had to be run so infrequently. I can certainly understand why someone would want to move onto something that removed the need for it.
When I swapped from l windows to linux my at the 12+ year old pc went from needing like 15 minutes from boot to load the web browser. Linux mint cut that down to 1 minute. yes i cleaned my disk and defrag it regularly. Just less bloat and better fs
I got curious so did some quick research. I know very little about file systems and Windows. Found this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS I wonder what Microsoft wanted to improve upon or change?
@Montagge @riskable @phoenix591 @proton_lynx It’s from Microsoft, it’s proprietary.
I don’t necessarily see that as wrong
I think a better question would be: “what’s not wrong with NTFS?”
His list is so expansive he cant even list one item from it in response.
The only reason why there’s NTFS hate in the Linux community is because it’s associated with windows.
This tribalism bullshit is tiring.
most of it yeah:/
NTFS is genuinely inferior in many respects, especially on hard drives, Mister Blue Tribe.
Yes, NTFS lacks features that surely one of the many Linux filesystems have. But it also has features others do not. There is no one-siize-fits-all filesystem.
- Ext4 is generally faster than NTFS, but cannot handle as large of files
- ZFS has a multitude of features that NTFS does not, like zraid, dedup, etc., but usually at the cost of RAM.
- BTRFS is included in the Linux kernel and also has many features, like being able to conveniently switch hard drive raid-like configurations on the fly with rebalance, but doesn’t support fs-level encryption
- NTFS lacks in many features the others do not, and is a “non-standard” filesystem. However, it’s one of the few with better cross-platform support, more advanced access control, pre-emptive journaling, reparse points, etc.
It’s quite obvious that my calling out tribalism has felt to you an attack.
We get enough of this “us vs them” mentality in literally every topic and medium. I’d just like a little more nuance and genuine discourse. So I apologize if I’ve offended you.
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I’ll try. Short: It’s not as powerful as ZFS.
Examples:
- no low cost snapshots (don’t harm performance)
- no checksums, no self-healing
- 256 TB limit
- magical reserved $ and OneDrive filenames
- magical 8.3 mapping
- broken standard API calls (CreateFileW instead of fopen)
Another reason ZFS is better is it gives you something to do with all your spare RAM.
also ntfs doesn’t support many common symbols. so you can’t use them
Ext4 came out 20 years ago.
No. No no no, I clearly remember I was sitting in my discrete math class at college reading my rss feeds when… Oh no.
Need some extra AAs for your PDA so you can finish that thought?
That’s cold…
Shit, that’s probably older than the interns in my office…
It was a really hard hit for me, when the new hires were grownups, but born in a different millennium than me.
I can’t believe Microsoft is still using this piece of crap filesystem. If they had a CoW filesystem they could even paper over the mess that is Windows Update without having to actually fix it, they could save petabytes of storage over the world and significantly improve reliability all in one go. Let’s not even mention how NTFS is amazingly slow on hard drives, manages to fragment to hell and back without doing anything, requires offline repairs like it was FAT32 and its compression barely does anything while massively slowing down the computer.
Yet here I am envying btrfs, APFS, ZFS and even fucking XFS for their reflinks and CoW.
In fact, not even WSL uses a modern FS, I think Microsoft is allergic to modern FSs.
None of these problems are really dealbreakers for a consumer-oriented file system in 2023. Not even ext4 supports CoW. Now that everyone boots off an SSD, things like file fragmentation no longer matter, and most of NTFS’ continued slowness has more to do with Windows itself than the actual file system.
ReFS is Microsoft’s new file system meant for more advanced use cases. It supports many but not all of these advanced features. Starting with Windows 11, you can actually boot off a ReFS drive, though I’m not sure that is a recommended configuration.
NTFS provided features other filesystems still don’t really provide, 20 years ago. The ACLs NTFS provides are decades ahead of their Linux equivalents, it had compression, quotas and encryption long before it was cool. The 65k character limit for a file name is small compared to its modern brethren but that still gives you more than enough space.
Microsoft’s choices related to fragmentation were unfortunate at the time, but now that hard disks are mostly things in third hand PCs and NAS setups, that’s no longer a concern. The Windows driver isn’t exactly the fastest thing out there, but its reliability is great. The only thing I can hold against it is its license, but that’s been a problem with ZFS for years too.
Microsoft came up with ReFS, and it was actually a good idea, but it wasn’t that useful in practice when NTFS could do the job just fine.
Things like data deduplication are actually possible in NTFS. It seems to be locked to server SKUs on Windows but the filesystem can do it.
All of that said, there’s nothing stopping you from getting a filesystem driver and using ZFS on your windows machine if you really need a CoW filesystem.
I may as well make myself unpopular with some context…
Some here have compared NTFS with ZFS, which is unfair as ZFS is over 12 years younger. In 1993 machines had an average of less than 4Mb of RAM, and the average disk size was probably somewhere in the 80-100Mb range. NTFS required more RAM - if you wanted to run it I think you had to have 12Mb of RAM minimum, maybe even 16Mb. If you didn’t have that you had to install your Windows NT 3.1 copy with FAT…
A better comparison filesystem would be XFS, which was developed at around the same time and saw its first release in 1994.
XFS has had a lot more development of late than NTFS has, and it could be argued that because of that it now has the edge. But both are venerable survivors of that era. Both are reliable, robust, feature-rich and widely deployed.
A lot of problems that people have with NTFS are to do with the way Windows handles disk access rather than the filesystem itself. A filesystem is more than just an on-disk layout and a bit of code to read or write from it, it also has to interact with OS disk buffering systems, security systems, caching mechanisms, and possibly even things like file locking and notification mechanisms.
Windows has a concept of the “installable file system” - these days it’s primarily a way to load filter drivers that can inspect all I/O operations. It’s how Windows security programs like antivirus work, but also how Windows prevents writes to its own folders by ordinary users. As you can guess, that slows things down. On the boot/OS drive of a Windows machine there are a lot of filter drivers. Android developers know this from how long some build operations take, and have often cursed at NTFS for it. Yet if you move the project onto a non-OS NTFS drive, suddenly it’s much faster - because that drive lacks many of those filter drivers, as there is no OS to protect on that drive.
The point here being that NTFS often gets slammed for issues which aren’t its fault, and it has no control over.
NTFS is probably in the top ten most-installed filesystems ever. And high on that top ten. (I wonder what that top ten would look like? I think that embedded use of ext2 probably places it near the top, but then you have wildcards like the Minix file system… anyway, back on track!)
Filesystems are one of those things that everyone takes for granted, yet are incredibly important. NTFS may not be native to Linux, and may come from somewhere that many see as “the enemy”, but I think 30 years of tireless work deserves some recognition.
Happy birthday, NTFS. You’ve done well.
Thank you for the explanations!
Stuff shouldn’t include temporal or subjective aspects in their name like New Technology File System, Grand Unified Bootloader… that’s all I got but you get the idea.
I’m jumping industries here, but Nintendo could not get that out of their system for a while. A game titled “New Super Mario Bros.” came out in it’s first first iteration in 2006. It did quite well, so they kept making sequels, the most recent titled “New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe”. They also put out a couple game consoles with “New” at the beginning, if memory serves.
Nintendo DS => Nintendo 3DS => New Nintendo 3DS => New Nintendo 3DS XL
NT stands for “no toast”. The guy who named it forgot his breakfast that morning.
When asked what NT stood for he lied and came up with “new technology” on the spot.
(And if you believe that I have a bridge to sell you.)
XFS is 29 years old and certainly still in use as well.
I’ve heard that ReFS is supposedly replacing NTFS, on Windows.
ReFS still is not supported for use as a boot (C:) drive, but it’s used extensively in enterprise environments for VHD storage and as a backup target.
Snapshotting and merging is much faster because of “Fast Cloning.” It also has something called “integrity streams” which can be used to tell if data has been corrupted.
I don’t understand this all at a deep level, but it seems promising.
Mmmm… butter… (Fs)
Was just helping my mom get some files off her old Windows Vista hard drive the other day. I was celebrating and didn’t even know it, lol
Windows XP is great and I’ll never upgrade my blood pressure machine from it.
I’m giving grandpa (ntfs) a defragment as a gift 💗
