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NTFS turns 30 years old today! I hear it's still in use by some crufty old legacy operating systems 😁 (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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 πŸ‘

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[–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

I heard, this commercial distribution β€œWindows” 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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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    On the bright side it only very rarely destroys itself when updating. However, some very loud foss distributions do it fairly often.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    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 ...

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    Oof this is only thing if you have the os on an HDD. I've had similar behavior on *buntu running off of an HDD.

    On an sdd or nvme you'll never have stuff like this happen.

    There is an argument to be made for it being better ux to not have programs update without telling you. Winget isn't perfect, but it can auto update your stuff if need be.

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    • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    There's nothing wrong with solid old file systems; ext4 is almost 17 and no one complains about it,

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    But that's the problem, NTFS is not solid at all.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    What's wrong with ntfs?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Nothing inherently wrong with NTFS itself as a filesystem besides being proprietary, and Microsoft supplies absolutely no support for using it in Linux. All the work done to get it running in Linux has been from the ground up and it shows. Many times I've had a hiccup on my external drives and they completely lock up until they're repaired on a windows machine. Unfortunately NTFS is one of the only journaled file system that works on both Windows, Apple, and Linux.

    There has also been a lot of advances for filesystems like checksumming so you know when you get bitrot. Or copy-on-write which can take snapshots of a file and then further changes are stored as the difference. You can then rollback to any snapshot you've taken.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Very slow, still needs defragmented, proprietary, (I know a lot of people don't care about that but also a lot feel that proprietary software is malware) and is so unbelievably slow on hard drives. I know I said slow twice but god damn on a hard drive it's rough. I know just get an SSD but I have a 2TB hard drive I keep my games on. It used to be on NTFS so I could dual-boot and not download a game twice but once I left windows I put ext4 on it and it helps a bit.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    I have a 2TB HDD that was ntfs and now ext4 as well. I can't say I've noticed a difference, but I didn't do any benchmarking either.

    I wouldn't consider ntfs as malware like I would something like anticheat software. As far as I know ntfs doesn't intentionally or negligently harm, open a system to harm, or perform tasks that have nothing to do with the designed function.

    Drefragging sucks I guess, but it had to be run so infrequently. I can certainly understand why someone would want to move onto something that removed the need for it.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    When I swapped from l windows to linux my at the 12+ year old pc went from needing like 15 minutes from boot to load the web browser. Linux mint cut that down to 1 minute. yes i cleaned my disk and defrag it regularly. Just less bloat and better fs

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    • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    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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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    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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    • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    XFS is 29 years old and certainly still in use as well.

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    [–] 1 point 3 years ago

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

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    [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Ext4 came out 20 years ago.

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    • [–] 0 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

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

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    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.

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    • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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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