When Microsoft launched Windows 8 in December 2011, it also introduced a new file system called ReFS (Resilient File System, Elastic File System). Compared with NTFS (New Technology File System, new technology file system), ReFS has higher damage resistance, better performance (such as on a virtual machine), and larger data capacity support (ReFS supports up to 35PB, while NTFS only supports 256TB) and other advantages.
However, so far, this new generation of file systems has been limited to Windows Server. In fact, Microsoft limited ReFS support on Windows 10 Pro and Enterprise editions in 2017.
In January of this year, the company began allowing Windows 11 to be installed on ReFS volumes, which means that Microsoft wants to bring ReFS to a wider user base. At that time, if users wanted to try to run Windows on this file system, they could only do a fresh installation and could not perform an in-place upgrade. This is about to change, though, as the latest Windows 11 Canary build 25931 supports in-place upgrades.
Twitter user and Windows enthusiast Xeno discovered that in their Windows 11 Canary channel build 25931, in-place upgrades for ReFS volumes are now possible. As shown above, in the new Canary build 25931 simulating a Windows 11 in-place upgrade process on a ReFS volume, the installer works fine, whereas in previous builds this would have failed.
This isn’t the only progress Microsoft has made in supporting ReFS on Windows 11, the company has also updated the file system version to 3.10 from the previous 3.0.9. It may be a while before ReFS becomes an installation option for all users, though, and it’s more likely that Microsoft will offer both NTFS and ReFS options.
