New NTFS for Windows 2008 R2

What are the major changes?

Several enhancements to improve performance have been made to the NTFS file system.

• Delete notification for solid state devices (SSDs) that support T10 Trim
  
• New opportunistic locks (oplocks) semantics and introduction of oplock keys
  
• Support for file system metadata defragmenting
  
• Improvements in Volume Shrink
  
• Ability to disable short names on a per-volume basis
  
• Improved concurrency of read requests while flushing
  
• Native VHD support
  
• Chkdsk performance improvements
  
• Robocopy performance enhancement
  
• Local file copy improvements

Chkdsk performance improvements

In Windows Server 2008 R2, enhancements to the command-line tool Chkdsk increase the availability of volumes by reducing the amount of time it takes to perform a Chkdsk run. Chkdsk scales with the amount of available RAM in the system. Running Chkdsk on a server running Windows Server 2008 R2 is significantly faster than on a server running Windows Server 2008 or systems with similar configurations.

Robocopy performance enhancement

The copy utility, Robocopy, has been enhanced to allow for multithreaded copies. This significantly improves remote and high-latency transfer rates by opening multiple threads to perform a concurrent copy operation, which increases the total data throughput.

Local file copy improvements

Optimizations in the memory and cache manager enable improvements in local file copy scenarios. File copy times for small, medium, and large (greater than 8 MB) files have been reduced. The greatest improvement is for medium and large files (depending on the nature of the file set, storage, and memory subsystems).