Goodbye NTFS

When Windows Vista was in development, I remember Microsoft promising to release Vista with the wonder that was WinFS, a revolutionary file system that would get rid of directories and file names forever, using a relational database that would allow developers to completely scrap file formats. Attributes could be used to sort files by unheard of searches, such as “find all emails from people who live in my area that are at least of 18 years of age,” and more. By WinFS providing the schema for a file, any application would be able to handle that file, regardless of whether or not the developer had written a parser for that particular file type; no more would an application not be able to save in a particular format or be restricted by the synchronization of data changes. WinFS was a dream, then Microsoft announced plans to release WinFS after Vista, and all we got was a lousy beta that was nothing near what the WinFS community had expected. Then in 2006, Ballmer stated that WinFS was still under development, so hopes began to rise for WinFS to appear in Windows 7. By now, those hopes can be reliably shelved.

WinFS would have been the XML of file systems. But now it’s dead. Microsoft’s claim that WinFS will be released in small pieces is weak, as no application can become one as it is combined with several other applications, but only improve that program. We can only hope that WinFS or something like it will reappear later in the computing industry and help to deliver the next generation of computing.

The problem with NTFS is that it is archaic. It has long been surpassed by other file systems such as ext (especially the new ext4), ReiserFS, and more. We can only hope that Microsoft will finally develop a new file system to replace NTFS, as issues such as fragmentation, low data integrity, and stability. Whereas NTFS tends to rarely lock up and freeze on the user, ext and other file systems achieved almost absolute integrity years ago, such as ext3. NTFS can get unbearably slow with thousands of files and folders (server setups), yet other file systems such as ReiserFS tend to soar in such scenarios.

I do not mean to insult Microsoft or Windows, but NTFS is simply too old; it’s even older than Windows 2000 (having originally appeared for Windows NT). Microsoft just needs to start developing a replacement for NTFS so that the Windows community can move on from fragmentation and finally have some journaling support (which GNU/Linux and Mac implemented years ago). Also, another excellent move by Microsoft would be to release the next file system drivers as open source, which would allow much faster integration into other operating systems and cross compatibility. It took NTFS-3g years to achieve reliability with NTFS drives, causing GNU/Linux and Mac to not have decent NTFS writing support all the way up to about 2006.

All we can do is sit back and hope that Microsoft finally gets rid of NTFS and its limitations; however, considering that the software giant has recently really turned its act around, releasing incredibly high quality software such as Microsoft Security Essentials and Windows 7, I’m sure that it’s not too much to hope that a file system can be expected in Windows 8 (maybe even WinFS).