Will windows 7 have WINFS?

[Brandon Live Veteran]

NTFS is much more modern / clean than HFS+ or Ext3. If you want to compare it to something, compare it to the basically dead ReiserFS project or to ZFS.

Fragmentation is a problem that will start to solve itself with solid state disks. Besides, it's better to defer the defragmentation process until idle time, rather than proactively doing it at write time (which slows down write performance substantially).

[redfish]

never mind...

Edited June 2, 2008 by brianshapiro

[giga Veteran]

NTFS is much more modern / clean than HFS+ or Ext3. If you want to compare it to something, compare it to the basically dead ReiserFS project or to ZFS.

Fragmentation is a problem that will start to solve itself with solid state disks. Besides, it's better to defer the defragmentation process until idle time, rather than proactively doing it at write time (which slows down write performance substantially).

Really? Write times are perfectly adequate here.

On-the-fly Defragmentation only occurs in the following instance:

When a file is opened on an HFS+ volume, the following conditions are tested:

* If the file is less than 20 MB in size

* If the file is not already busy

* If the file is not read-only

* If the file has more than eight extents

* If the system has been up for at least three minutes

If all of the above conditions are satisfied, the file is relocated -- it is defragmented on-the-fly.

OS X/HFS+ have built in counter measures to stop defragmentation for happening the first place though: http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/fragmentation/

[Malisk]

I do think it's about time Microsoft designed a filesystem that dosnt have all the fragmentation issues that the current NTFS platform has. Both HFS+ and EXT3 are shining examples of this yet Microsoft is falling behind big time

Could be useful, I'd just like to add here that WinFS wasn't a file system on that level. WinFS ran on top of NTFS and thus suffered from the same fragmentation issues that plague NTFS. The intention was not to fix this either with WinFS, but to build a more object-oriented file system better uncoupled from the hardware / network to the end user, e.g. replacing the typical hardware-related volumes with abstract "storages".

On the object orientation topic, I think Windows PowerShell looks interesting there. There, you manipulate each file, directory, or volume, as an object with various properties, and can do actions on them in scripts. :) Something that separates PowerShell from CMD and even most Unix shells like bash, ksh, zsh, tcsh, etc.