Re: Is Microsoft Trying To Revive ReFS?

On Sat, 3/29/2025 2:43 AM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Sat, 29 Mar 2025 00:29:49 -0400, Paul wrote:
 

On Fri, 3/28/2025 5:23 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

>
On Thu, 27 Mar 2025 20:25:31 -0400, Paul wrote:
>

And yeah, I just bought a 35 petabyte hard drive yesterday.
What a coincidence :-)

>
In Linux, we can have volumes spanning multiple physical drives, using
technologies like LVM (not to be confused with LLVM).
>
Not sure that Windows has anything like LVM, though.
>

You would need to find a server group, to discover best practice.
There is Storage Spaces. and Veritas Dynamic Disk allows some virtual
volumes to be constructed.

 
So, mainly third-party stuff? Limited or no functionality built-in?
 

The Veritas technology was *bought* by Microsoft, and part of
the contract terms, are to include the name of the company
inventing the idea. Dynamic disks have been in Windows for over 20 years.
The dynamic disk metadata is stored on all disk drives connected to
the PC, so it cannot get lost. Technologies like this age,
and there are fewer reasons to use them today.

Storage Spaces is a *Microsoft* technology. I'm not skilled
enough to give you a lesson in all the options. It is used
on servers. You might find one user in the Windows group
who uses it for home arrays/pools. Most of us don't have
enough disk-on-line to need stuff like that. It can handle a lot
of disks, likely to be as many as you can fit cards in the
PCIe slots for. At least 100 disks can be in a pool. In my sample
photo, I only put four disks (VHD virtual ones), just to illustrate
the interfaces for setup.

To some extent, Microsoft buys fewer softwares today. In WinXP
era, it bought the Presidents Software defragmenter, put it in
WinXP. The interface for that software, does not give credit
to the Presidents corporation people. Microsoft also bought
the defragmenter safe-block-move software from another company
(they may have a patent on it), and all the defragmenter companies
today, including the shrink and expand operations for partitions,
use the safe-block-mover to try to prevent trouble. While a disk
is being defragmented, if the power goes off, nothing is lost.
This implies atomic updates of some sort, or at least,
a safe way of moving blocks.

In the Win98 era, Microsoft bought the network stack, but
that is purely my own theory based on how the OS can "hang"
on certain network operations. And it implies a lack of
integration when Win98 was written. The network stack may
have been monolithic and just plunked into the OS. And that
had consequences for some network operations. A number of companies
bought network stacks. Tenon Intersystems used to sell network
stacks to third-parties. but after a certain company "donated"
a network stack to the industry, companies stopped buying them,
and started "owning" the stacks internally. And were faced with one fewer
issue to solve. They did not necessarily copy the source code
of that sample stack, but if they needed a sample implementation,
they could look at that code for the "inspiration".

   Paul