1 yr. ago • 91%

NTFS turns 30 years old today! I hear it's still in use by some crufty old legacy operating systems 😁

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 👍

Technology @lemmy.ml NTFS turns 30 years old today! I hear it's still in use by some crufty old legacy operating systems 😁

Technology @lemmy.world NTFS turns 30 years old today! I hear it's still in use by some crufty old legacy operating systems 😁

54 comments

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.

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- package manger
  
  current technology
  
  How do I tell microsoft this isn't new
  
  8
  
  r/woosh?
  
  0
- On the bright side it only very rarely destroys itself when updating. However, some very loud foss distributions do it fairly often.
  
  4
  
  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 ...
  
  5
  
  It's good at destroying other OSs that may be installed alongside though
  
  4
There's nothing wrong with solid old file systems; ext4 is almost 17 and no one complains about it,

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- But that's the problem, NTFS is not solid at all.
  
  30
  
  It's not?
  
  14
  
  What's wrong with ntfs?
  
  9
Ext4 came out 20 years ago.

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- No. No no no, I clearly remember I was sitting in my discrete math class at college reading my rss feeds when... Oh no.
  
  47
  
  Need some extra AAs for your PDA so you can finish that thought?
  
  12
- Shit, that's probably older than the interns in my office...
  
  11
  
  It was a really hard hit for me, when the new hires were grownups, but born in a different millennium than me.
  
  2
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.
  
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- [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
  
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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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- 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.
  
  10
  
  Nintendo DS => Nintendo 3DS => New Nintendo 3DS => New Nintendo 3DS XL
  
  8
- 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.)
  
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- [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
  
  1
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.

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- Thank you for the explanations!
  
  8
XFS is 29 years old and certainly still in use as well.

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I've heard that ReFS is supposedly replacing NTFS, on Windows.

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- 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.
  
  1
Mmmm... butter.... (Fs)

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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

2
Windows XP is great and I'll never upgrade my blood pressure machine from it.

1
I'm giving grandpa (ntfs) a defragment as a gift 💗

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