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- cross-posted to:
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- technology
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 👍
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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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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?
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
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.
@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.
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.
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.
Shit, that’s probably older than the interns in my office…
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!
You’re welcome! 👍
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.
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Mmmm… butter… (Fs)
@Zozano @riskable anyone else heard of #earthactiongloballeague
I bet you’re one of those cool dudes that spells Microsoft with a dollar sign 😂
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.
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
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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.
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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.
XFS is 29 years old and certainly still in use as well.
