NTFS or ReFS
Problem reported by ICT Informatik - Today at 4:54 AM
Submitted
Hi 

Which Windows file system is better for Smartermail: NTFS or ReFS? Any recommendations or experiences?

Best regards
David
Reto Replied
We use ReFS on Hyper-V Hosts, for SmarterMail still using NTFS.
Gabriele Maoret - SERSIS Replied
NTFS. 

NTFS is best suited for managing thousands of files, which is what you do with SmarterMail.

ReFS, on the other hand, is suited for managing VM workloads (i.e., VHD/VHDX) and databases like msSQL, or backup storage.

I'll also add one thing: although ReFS "should" be more secure and stable in terms of data preservation, we've already had strange errors that made it impossible to read entire VHDX files (while others remained readable ON THE SAME PARTITION...).
With NTFS, this has never happened to us...

In practice, NTFS is much more mature and stable (ReFS is NOT ZFS, even though Microsoft hoped so...)
Gabriele Maoret - Head of SysAdmins and CISO at SERSIS
Currently manages 7 SmarterMail installations (1 in the cloud for SERSIS which provides services to a few hundred third-party email domains + 6 on-premise for customers who prefer to have their mail server in-house)
Bruce Replied
Also, you need to think about any backups you make. Many backup solutions don't handle ReFS well. For example, when we tried it, our backup software could not perform granular restores of files, which would mean mounting the whole disk of many terabytes to retrieve just a single folder.

Reply to Thread

Enter the verification text