Back in 2011-2012, when Microsoft first launched Windows 8, it introduced a new file system called the Resilient File System (ReFS).
Compared to NTFS (New Technology File System, which debuted with the NT system in 1993), ReFS claimed to bring more resilience, higher performance, and higher data size support (35PB vs. 256TB for NTFS) on virtual machines (vm), among other benefits.
In practice, however, Microsoft has only supported Windows Server so far. Microsoft did, however, offer ReFS support for Windows 10 Enterprise sku in 2017 (though both support formatting to ReFS format themselves).
However, even in 2023, Microsoft still doesn’t offer ReFS support for client systems, but this may soon change, including the file system as the boot partition for the installation system, without the hassle that it was before.
Windows enthusiast @Xeno has discovered that Microsoft seems to have started enabling ReFS on Windows 11, and while the feature is still disabled on the latest Win11 Dev 25281, it can be enabled in ViviTool using the special ID “42189933”. For those of you who are interested, you can give it a try.
For comparison, if you try to install Windows 11 Build 25281 to the ReFS partition without ID “42189933” enabled the installation will be interrupted and an error will be displayed: Windows could not be installed to this hard disk space. The file system on the current partition [ReFS] does not support Windows installation.
