Is NTFS on the way out? [LWN.net]

Is NTFS on the way out?

Posted Jan 23, 2026 18:52 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
Parent article: Filesystem medley: EROFS, NTFS, and XFS

Better NTFS support is great news. But Microsoft appears to be replacing NTFS with their new filesystem ReFS (Resilient File System), at least for big disks. It might not be true to call NTFS "the standard Windows filesystem format" any longer.

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Is NTFS on the way out?

Posted Jan 23, 2026 22:44 UTC (Fri) by garyguo (subscriber, #173367) [Link] (5 responses)

The same can be said in 2016. 10 years later, NTFS is still the default and booting from ReFS is still consider experimental...

Is NTFS on the way out?

Posted Jan 24, 2026 0:09 UTC (Sat) by wsy (subscriber, #121706) [Link]

The same can be said in 2003 when they announced WinFs.

Is NTFS on the way out?

Posted Jan 24, 2026 4:05 UTC (Sat) by djwong (subscriber, #23506) [Link] (3 responses)

Filesystems are hard, XFS is just about finished, and it's been what, 33 years? 😜

Is NTFS on the way out?

Posted Jan 24, 2026 14:30 UTC (Sat) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (2 responses)

> Filesystems are hard, XFS is just about finished, and it's been what, 33 years? 😜

Has it become better with small files ? I was using it a lot in the past, but I had to abandon it on my laptop for ext4 15 years ago when every git operation on my linux directory would make my disk seek for 30 seconds before completing the operation. However for large files, streaming writes etc it was awesome. I initially started to use it on network probes running tcpdump that would continuously capture traffic on multiple interfaces and store it to disk. Writing and rotating 10GB files was as instant as doing it on a readme with XFS, and I'm speaking about pentium4 with sata1 disks. Also it never failed even once on me, despite not having invoked "halt" nor "shutdown" on a linux machine for the last 20 years, since boot-time journal replay is always faster than a "clean" system shutdown.

On the other hand, ext4 is also good for my use cases nowadays, I'm just not sure if XFS would bring me anything more, or could still annoy me on numerous small files like a kernel source tree.

Is NTFS on the way out?

Posted Jan 24, 2026 21:28 UTC (Sat) by dgc (subscriber, #6611) [Link] (1 responses)

> Has it become better with small files ? I was using it a lot in the past,
> but I had to abandon it on my laptop for ext4 15 years ago when every
> git operation on my linux directory would make my disk seek for 30
> seconds before completing the operation.

Yes, most of major small file/metadata performance issues (in comparison to ext4) were fixed with the introduction of delayed logging in 2.6.36 (i.e. about 15 years ago). That improved transaction rates from being disk bound at a few hundred a second to being CPU bound at tens of thousands of transactions/second.

These days XFS can run a couple of million asynchronous transactions per second through the journal, so highly concurrent workloads are able to scan, create, rename, unlink, etc at rates of over half a million files/second, even on a typical cheap consumer SSDs....

Is NTFS on the way out?

Posted Jan 26, 2026 5:19 UTC (Mon) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link]

Good to know, thank you! I'll have to try it again then!

Is NTFS on the way out?

Posted Jan 24, 2026 13:21 UTC (Sat) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link] (7 responses)

It looks like Microsoft changed their mind on that in 2017. Support for creating new ReFS volumes was removed from Windows 10, except for Server and Enterprise editions. While all versions of Windows 10/11 can read-write ReFS volumes, it seems that ReFS is not currently slated to replace NTFS.

Is NTFS on the way out?

Posted Jan 24, 2026 17:00 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (6 responses)

It already change it back and Windows 11 can create it and even boot from it.

But after two flip-flops we don't know where would it go next…

It's not like Apple who just said “we are going APFS” and just did that. Granted, HFS+ was a crazy unstable pile of hacks on top of hacks, at this point, thus abandoned it was much easier that for Microsoft to abandon NTFS which is simply bad, not awful.

Is NTFS on the way out?

Posted Jan 25, 2026 20:52 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (5 responses)

So with ReFS, maybe Windows will be able to delete or even just rename a file in use in 10-20 years time? Who knows, software updates might not take 30 minutes anymore.

Unless Windows first becomes what "DOS" or COBOL is today. Even _gaming_ is under serious threat now, who would have thought?

Is NTFS on the way out?

Posted Jan 25, 2026 22:55 UTC (Sun) by garyguo (subscriber, #173367) [Link] (1 responses)

That was possible for a while now in Windows, when `FILE_DISPOSITION_POSIX_SEMANTICS` is specified to delete a file. I think it is even the default in newer version of Windows.

Is NTFS on the way out?

Posted Jan 26, 2026 5:10 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Indeed, it looks like this was changed with very little fanfare:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60424732/did-the-beha...

Is NTFS on the way out?

Posted Jan 25, 2026 23:16 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

> Who knows, software updates might not take 30 minutes anymore.

How is that even related? Android and macOS do that, too — and they are not using NTFS.

They all are just using process that is less error-prone (and is actually even recommended by many Linux distributions, just not enforced) instead of giving the user rope and hoping that s/he not hung himself or herself.

Is NTFS on the way out?

Posted Jan 26, 2026 5:15 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

It's related because when you cannot delete files in use then you need to stop, delete and restart processes using the files. And when you are not 100% sure, then you need to restart pretty much everything.

It may not be the only upgrade limitation but it's an important one.

> Android and macOS do that, too

"How is that even related?"

Is NTFS on the way out?

Posted Jan 26, 2026 18:11 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> It's related because when you cannot delete files in use then you need to stop,

Or you nick an idea or two from the 80s ... and rename the old file in place so you can replace it.

You still need to reboot to ensure everything is running the upgrade, and then clean up all the old files, but that's not too hard ...

Cheers,
Wol