Windows 11’s New File System ReFS and Move to Rust Programming Language

Windows 11 may soon switch to a new file system ReFSwhich is supposed to replace the existing file system NTFS. This has already been revealed in earlier “preview builds” of Windows 11. However, the release date to regular users is not yet known, and after the release, it should only affect new installations of the Windows 11 operating system.

ReFS

ReFS or “Resilient FileSystem” (in translation “Resilient File System”) is a Microsoft file system that was first introduced in Windows Server 2012. It was created using the source codes of the latest versions of NTFS. Compared to its predecessor, it mainly offers high protection against data damage. We could poke so-called Integrity-streams, where the ReFS system uses checksums for metadata and file data, which allows it to detect corruption. Or proactive error correction, when in addition to data verification before reading or writing, the system introduces a data integrity scanner (tzv. scrubber), which regularly scans the volume, identifies hidden data corruptions and initiates the repair itself. Currently, the ReFS file system is only available for use in the latest versions of the Windows Server operating system.

Differences between NTFS and ReFS

ReFS offers several key improvements over NTFS. In addition to better protection against data corruption, ReFS also offers support for storage up to 35 PB (petabytes) instead of only 256 TB (terabytes) for NTFS. But nothing is ideal, so the ReFS file system does not support, for example, compression and encryption of the file system or disk quotas. It is also not supported on removable media (typically USB flash drives).

Rust

Other changes will take place in the very core of Windows 11. At the BlueHat IL 2023 conference David Westonvice president of operating system security at Microsoft, confirmed the company’s plan to use the system Rust when rolling out the Windows 11 operating system. The integration of Windows and Rust is now closer than ever, he said. This includes converting some of Microsoft’s internal code from C++ to their Rust equivalents.