this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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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 👍

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NTFS provided features other filesystems still don't really provide, 20 years ago. The ACLs NTFS provides are decades ahead of their Linux equivalents, it had compression, quotas and encryption long before it was cool. The 65k character limit for a file name is small compared to its modern brethren but that still gives you more than enough space.

Microsoft's choices related to fragmentation were unfortunate at the time, but now that hard disks are mostly things in third hand PCs and NAS setups, that's no longer a concern. The Windows driver isn't exactly the fastest thing out there, but its reliability is great. The only thing I can hold against it is its license, but that's been a problem with ZFS for years too.

Microsoft came up with ReFS, and it was actually a good idea, but it wasn't that useful in practice when NTFS could do the job just fine.

Things like data deduplication are actually possible in NTFS. It seems to be locked to server SKUs on Windows but the filesystem can do it.

All of that said, there's nothing stopping you from getting a filesystem driver and using ZFS on your windows machine if you really need a CoW filesystem.