Configure Windows Server Storage.
Let's start by running a high‑level comparison between the New
Technology File System, NTFS, and the Resilient File System, ReFS. On
the NTFS side, we have a very mature file system that's been around
pretty much as long as I've been in the industry, if not longer,
actually. Windows NT is when I came into the game. We can format
volumes both for the OS drive, as well as fixed data disks, as well as
removable data disks.
It's a pretty universal file system.
As we've seen elsewhere in this course, we can do quotas,
compression, encryption. And that encryption can be whole
volume encryption with BitLocker Drive Encryption, or it
could be Encrypting File System, EFS.
NTFS is known for its reliability and bad sector
detection and bad sector repair.
Well, you might wonder, well, if NTFS is so great,
why did Microsoft design ReFS?
Well, it came about much later in Windows Server 2012.
I don't want to get into the whole history on it, it's got quite
an interesting history as a matter of fact,
but it's meant to extend NTFS particularly for data
and virtual machine workloads.
We can use ReFS only on fixed data disks.
We can use BitLocker Drive Encryption, but not EFS. No removable data disks.
The resiliency part of ReFS deals with detecting and fixing corruptions.
It's an extension of the capability offered by NTFS.
So we've got enhanced resiliency and failure detection and repair.
We also have enhanced performance,
especially with virtual machine workloads and when you're using
Storage Spaces and Storage Spaces Direct.
And then lastly, we have scalability.
We've seen this in technology since the beginning.
When there's a v2 of some technology,
almost always the limits will be much greatly expanded.
And so Microsoft says you can scale your ReFS volumes to millions of
terabytes. If you want to know numbers and maximum volume sizes,
that's basically trivia, we don't need to know that for the exam,
but you can check the exercise files, and I'll point you to some
online comparisons. At the end of the day,
I just want to make sure you know about some of the top
line differences between NTFS and ReFS.
A big one with ReFS to repeat is that we cannot boot from an ReFS volume
and that it shines particularly well when you're doing Storage Spaces and S2D in Windows server failover clusters.