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.
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.
There’s nothing wrong with solid old file systems; ext4 is almost 17 and no one complains about it,
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
