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REFS..What do I need to know?


servonix

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So I have my server migrated to 2016E and I'm contemplating shuffling my pool around and reformatting my drives as REFS with integrity streams on.. I know I've seen Drashna post somewhere that his pool is using REFS now, so I'm assuming that development is far enough along to be fairly stable. My server is primarily a media and backup server, and the data integrity stuff REFS should provide would be a major plus. I'm just wondering which build version of DP I should use, as well as any caveats I should know about before making the move(especially if there are any drastic hits to performance VS 64K NTFS) Also on the same note, one of the few services I haven't set up yet on the server is WSUS. I have run the content store on the pool before with success, but was wondering if that would still be possible with REFS as the underlying filesystem of the drives since WSUS requires an NTFS formatted partition.

 

Thanks in advance to Drashna and anyone else who can provide some input!

 

Edit: I should also note that my network is 10Gb capable, and although I'm not quite maxing it out, I am taxing it a bit at times, so read performance is quite important, write not quite as much since I'll be adding a few SSD's for cache before too long.

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Well, there doesn't seem to be any issues with using ReFS. Moving my pool over was done in part to help thoroughly test that. 

 

However, StableBit DrivePool doesn't fully support it yet. There are a bunch of things that we could do to handle ReFS better, up to and including reporting the pool as ReFS instead of NTFS.  

 

 

As for WSUS, it most likely requires NTFS because it doesn't detect ReFS properly (it's older code, after all). Also, Older versions of ReFS didn't support Alternate Data Streams, which is heavily used by the database engine it uses (MS SQL Server, or an express version of it). 

 

 

As for performance, if you have "Integrity checking" enabled on the disk (on by default), then there is a performance hit for any writes on the disks.  This is because it's writing checksums for the data as it's being written to the file system.  

This can be disabled, but then, you're probably better off using NTFS. 

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Glad to hear you're not having any issues with it. I know the support isn't quite there yet, but the pros seem to outweigh the cons with regards to file integrity. 

 

Well for WSUS I intend to keep the sql database on a drive outside of the pool, I just want the actual content files on the pool, and that requires a drive that reports as NTFS. As of now Drivepool is still reporting the pool drive itself as NTFS, so in theory it should work even with the underlying drives as REFS. I guess you might not have a clear answer to whether or not it does as that's something you probably haven't tested. I might either bite the bullet and make the transition, or do a small-scale test in a VM and see the results for myself. Assuming that it works, would it be possible to implement a way to specify what the pool reports as (NTFS or REFS) with a pool consisting of REFS formatted drives in later versions of Drivepool? 

 

All that aside, write performance isn't terribly important, as I will have multiple ssd cache drives. What I'm really concerned about is if there is any penalty reading with integrity checking on vs NTFS.

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For WSUS, I'd recommend against it.  The database is the most likely reason here, but it is possible that the storage is doing some other stuff as well.  It could cause issues if the file system features it needs are not actually supported on ReFS. 

 

It's been a while since I've ran WSUS, so I'm not 100% sure. 

 

 

As for the read performance, IIRC, there is a slight hit, but not as bad as writes. 

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