this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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Genuine question, not being sarcastic.
What’s the benefit to the average end user to modernizing NTFS?
Sure, I love having btrfs on my NAS for all the features it brings, but I’m not a normal person. What significant changes that would affect your average user does NTFS require to modernize it?
I just see it as an “if it’s not broken” type thing. I can’t say I’ve ever given the slightest care about what filesystem my computer was running until I got into NAS/backups, which itself was a good 10 years after I got into building PCs. The way I see it, it doesn’t really matter when I’m reinstalling every few years and have backups elsewhere.
I'd add better built in multi-device support and recovery (think RAID and drive pooling) but that might be beyond the "average" user (which is always a vague term and I feel there are many types of users within that average). E.g. users that mod their games can benefit from snapshots and/or reflink copies allowing to make backups of their game dirs without taking up any additional space beyond the changes that the mods add.
Add speed in there
NTFS is slow
I agree all those are nice things to have, and things I'd want to see in an update. Now how can you sell those features to management? How do these improve the experience for the everyday end user?
I'd say the snapshots feature could be a major selling point. Windows needs a good backup/restore solution.
It just seems like potentially a ton of work to satisfy the needs of "people who think about filesystems", which is an extremely small subset of users. I can see how it might be hard to get the manpower and resources needed to rework the Windows default filesystem.
I really have no clue how much work it takes though, so it's just speculation on my end. I'm just curious; on one hand, I do see where NTFS is way behind, but on the other... who cares? I've somehow made it past 20 years of building WIndows PCs without really caring what filesystem I've used, from 95 all the way to 11.
I'm not sure you need to sell it to actual users. A lot of benefits of an advanced filesystem could be done by the OS itself, almost transparently. All of the features I mentioned could be managed by Windows, with only minimal changes to the UI. Even reflink copies could just be a control panel option then used by default in Explorer (equivalent of
cp --reflink=autoin Linux). And from the OS side, deduplication would help a lot on Windows given all of the DLL bundling, and weird shit they have to do to maintain legacy compatibility, and that's no small thing given how space inefficient modern Windows installs have become.It would be some work to upgrade it (maybe a lot given how ancient and likely full of cruft that Windows is full of with legacy compatibility) but it would eventually make the system more reliable and more space efficient.
But yeah, there are challenges. I'm mainly speaking in terms of
btrfswhich would take some time to port to Windows (although there is a 3rd party driver they'd want to handle it themselves I suspect) but they'll probably want to use their ownReFSand I've not really investigated it seriously so I can't say how ready that is for prime time. But given that it's being included as an option in some enterprise/server editions of Windows maybe it will be soon in consumer editions soon anyway (as much as I'd prefer something more open and widely supported, at least it's a step forward on Windows).At the very least, better filesystem level compression support. A somewhat common usecase might be people who use emulators. Both Wii U and PS3 are consoles where major emulators just use a folder on your filesystem. I know a lot of emulator users who are non-technical to the point that they don't have "show hidden files and folders" enabled.
Also your average person wouldn't necessarily need checksums, but having them built into the filesystem would lead to overall more reliability.