this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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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.
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.