Hello there,
What does everyone think about using ReFS now that it is available in Windows 11 and could replaces NTFS.
Has anyone tested this in DAW use? and in what applications? high track count Multi-Track recording/reading? large sample drives? NAS connected sample drives? backup drives? etc?
Thanks
ReFS is still not ready for replacing NTFS. There are several differences and Microsoft is working on it. It is also still hidden in the Dev Channel builds.
Several performance comparisons show that ReFS is behind NTFS and you want high performance for your system.
I’ve never found the file system itself to be a bottleneck (at least, not since the days of FAT-formatted spinners in a 386 running at 16MHz). Even loading large samples is no longer a problem with SSDs. I can’t think of any reason to switch from NTFS to ReFS, but I can think of a quite a few reasons not to.
Personally I would not want to use it; people who live at the cutting edge tend to, well, get cut.
So it wouldn’t for example, speed up something like MediaBay search?
Not at all, it even might be slightly slower than NTFS. For Windows 11 workstations it is still not enabled, unless you are in some Microsoft Insider Build releases.
For a typical Audio Workstation there is no real need to use ReFS, the new features of this filesystem are mainly targeted for servers with huge storage clusters.
One of the major drawbacks with ReFS for workstations is, you can’t use it for the boot partition and therefore your C: drive will stay on NTFS. Also all removable devices are not supported and there are some more issues, but you can see that for yourself here