Question

Identify and analyze the most significant two enhancement/improvement that take place in the file system of either Windows 8.1 or Windows 10.

Answer 1

The two significant enhancements / improvements in the file system of windows 10 are:

1. Advances in NTFS: The default file system for windows 10 is NTFS (New Technology File System). Windows 10 comes with the following advancement in NTFS technology:

• Increase in reliability: NTFS now uses its log file and checkpoint information to restore the consistency of the file system when the computer is restarted after a system failure. Bad sector errors are now dealt by dynamically re-mapping the cluster that contains the bad sector to new cluster and marks the original cluster as bad and never uses it again. NTFS uses utilities to monitor and correct file corruption issues in background without taking the disk offline.  
• Support for BitLocker Drive Encryption: BitLocker was introduced in Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2. It provides device encryption on x86 and x64 computer architecture with additional security for critical system information and other data stored on NTFS volumes. Device encryption helps protect data on computers, and it helps block malicious users from accessing the system files they rely on to discover the user's password, or from accessing a drive by physically removing it from the PC and installing it on a different one.
• Support for larger volumes: NTFS can now support disk volumes as large as 256 terabytes.
• Maximum file name: Starting from Windows 10 (version 1607) long file name support can be enabled which allows file names up to 32,767 characters (although you lose a few characters for mandatory characters that are part of the name) from early 260 characters.

2.  Storage Spaces feature:One can find Storage Spaces feature in Control Panel. This feature was added in Windows 8, and was improved in Windows 10. Storage Spaces is similar to RAID or LVM on Linux. The Storage Spaces feature built into Windows allows us to combine multiple hard drives into a single virtual drive.in order to create a Storage Space, we need at least two physical drives on your PC. These can be internal drives or external drives connected via USB.

Storage Spaces allows us to create a “storage pool” of two or more physical drives by grouping them together. After creating a "storage pool", Storage Spaces gives option to create three types of spaces: a simple space, mirror space and a parity space.

• Simple space is like normal space to give maximum storage from the combined drives. Windows will store only a single copy of your data across all the drives.
• A mirror space is designed to protect data from drive failure by storing multiple copies of your files. Mirror space is ideal for protecting important data from hardware failure.
• In parity space, Windows will keep a single copy of your data along with parity information. Parity spaces are slower than simple and mirror spaces and is used for data archival.

Storage spaces (mirror and parity space) makes use of Windows Resilient File System (ReFS). ReFS is a new file system designed to be more resilient against data corruption, perform better for certain workloads and scale better for very large file systems.

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