Optimize Windows Server 2019 with file server best practices

Many organizations have historically avoided the Resilient File System (ReFS) in favor of the NT File System (NTFS), and for good reason. The ReFS was developed for data resiliency, but the 1.1 version released with Windows Server 2012 was extremely limited in its capabilities compared to NTFS. Many NTFS features did not exist in ReFS, such as the ability to boot the system.

Microsoft continues to develop ReFS and, now, most of the NTFS features exist in ReFS. ReFS version 3.4 in Windows Server 2019 is far more feature-rich than the 1.1 version, but there are still some areas where it is lacking. For instance, ReFS does not support file system compression, encryption, disk quotas or DOS-compatible 8.3 filenames.

If you can live without these features, there are significant benefits to ReFS. It is far more scalable than NTFS and supports volume sizes up to 35 PB. ReFS includes several features to protect the integrity of the data on the volume. Windows Server 2019 has a proactive error correction feature that periodically scans ReFS volumes and automatically repairs corrupt data.