That was back in August and since then, there has not been anything too noteworthy in terms of Windows bootability support on ReFS. Meanwhile, Microsoft has also not updated the officially supported ReFS version up from 3.10 yet, and as such, trying to run Windows on any newer ReFS version leads to an immediate crash on the newest Canary build 26040. Apparently, the crash is worse than it was on previous builds as it now throws up no recovery messages either.
Sayan Sen at NeoWin
It seems like NTFS will be with us for quite a while longer.
Why change something that works ? Otherwise, there is ext4, BtrFS, …
I’m no filesystem buff, but i think NTFS has some inherent design shortcomings when applied to modern OSes and mass storage devices. NTFS was designed in an era when disks were 100MB at most and consisted of spinning platters. However nowadays almost all drives are a least 100GB and consist of random access flash memory.
Regardless of how forward thinking the devs were 30 years ago, the computing landscape is wildly different and many things we take for granted now were just pipe dreams then.
What sort of shortcomings? I know performance is often cited, but IIRC that has more to do with Win32 and not the filesystem itself (And, specifically, not even NTFS support for Win32-specific functionality. Win32 is at fault specifically)
Drumhellar,
Microsoft has a nice overview here.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/refs/refs-overview
They mention a lot of points about resiliency, scrubbing, automatic repairs, and so on. The ReFS features that seem interesting to me are block cloning and file level snapshots. The link also lists NTFS features that are unavailable on ReFS like compression.