When you update a file’s metadata, the ReFS file system will create a new copy of the metadata. If your computer fails or the power goes out during this process, there may be data corruption. For example, when you update a file’s metadata-the file name, for example-the NTFS file system will directly modify the file’s metadata. The new file system is also resistant to data corruption in other ways, too. An automated data integrity scanner regularly checks all files on the drive to identify and fix data corruption, too. ReFS doesn’t just check files for corruption when reading and writing them. It doesn’t require you reboot your system or take the drive offline, as NTFS does. If ReFS detects corrupted data and doesn’t have an alternate copy it can restore from, the file system can immediately remove the corrupted data from the drive.
This feature is available on both Windows 10 and Windows 8.1. ReFS is integrated with the Storage Spaces feature. If you set up a mirrored Storage Space using ReFS, Windows can easily detect file system corruption and automatically repair problems by copying the alternate copy of the data on another drive.
RELATED: How to Use Windows 10's Storage Spaces to Mirror and Combine Drives This means the file system itself has a built-in way to detect data corruption on the fly. Whenever it reads or writes a file, ReFS examines the checksum to ensure it’s correct. ReFS uses checksums for metadata-and it can optionally use checksums for file data, too. The “Resilient” part is highlighted in the name. ReFS is designed to be more resilient against data corruption, perform better for certain workloads, and scale better for very large file systems. You can’t just use ReFS instead of NTFS on your system drive.Īs ReFS is Microsoft’s newest file system, it’s designed to address a few major issues with NTFS. It has its own advantages and disadvantages. At the moment, ReFS is not just a replacement for NTFS. Short for “Resilient File System”, ReFS is a new file system built using code from the current NTFS file system. NTFS is still the only solution here.RELATED: What's the Difference Between FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS? For example, ReFS lacks of hard links support and this means it can’t be used to run the operating system and some applications. Microsoft made ReFS largely compatible with NTFS but it didn’t implement all its features. So it’s the perfect solution for data shares, archives, backups and to store Hyper-V virtual machine disks. Shared storage pools across machines for additional failure tolerance and load balancing.Resiliency to corruptions with “salvage” for maximum volume availability in all cases.