Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!


Most lame file system, NTFS? My horror story :(
New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.

All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.

Most lame file system, NTFS? My horror story :(

IntcsIntcs Member
edited May 2013 in General

To sum it up, I guess NTFS is no longer "usable" for me. Just so many of unreliability and threats that makes it an unusable file system. I guess most users of MS products and OS#%@# doesn't know that their file INFO, NAMES, LOCATIONS, ORDER etc etc etc, are isolated and in the most idiotic way humanity came with , and that's in a death area Microsoft places on your HDD once getting fooled to proceed with one "Format NTFS" traps placed within Windows, which is MFT. MFT structure, like dependencies and even backups are faulty in countless ways, not to mention the very, very common ones like viruses, any error!, any power issues, any instability of system, any unsafe removal of an hdd etc! Then comes the rest of faulty parts that as well gets NTFS volumes screwed all the time just like the faulty MBR and boot record, luckily MBR is getting a mandatory replacement since +2 TB drives are common which MBR doesn't support, however I've read that "limited backward compatibility with MBR", those words looks scary already.

CHKDSK in my bad experience, googling and calculations showed me it works in near 0.0000001 of the time :\ yet all Linux applications, 3rd party windows applications (if it didn't embed CHKDSK) and other OS, are all suggesting you TO GO BACK TO MICROSOFT AND USE CHKDSK!

IMHO, if EVERY developer didn't found that NTFS is a malicious file system, they would've made their alternative/superior file system repair tools, and wouldn't prefer to send you back to MS and rather not hold responsibility (cursing) instead of MS. Or like myself you'll end up insanely backing up and editing the disk data in binary!!

So now after 2 volumes being fully screwed up in a year, and Google is filled with unexpected horror stories, so I've been considering a way for using EXT file system to my storage disks, or any other reliable file system, to save my files under Windows. So if I can have an additional tiny NTFS partition on every hdd I have, with a portable version of proposed "tool" that mounts the the rest of disk under NTFS/Windows (so it's usable across platforms), is there a tool that does a similar job? I'll be looking myself as well, so will post what I get.

Lastly would note that backups didn't save me much in both failures! as for some reason my HDDs failed in the wrong time, so I'd suggest taking incremental backups everyday or 2, then weekly or every 2 weeks full backups. As even a 3-6 month old backups proved to be a big lose if restored when it was an option.

«1

Comments

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    Blah blah blah - NTFS is a fine filesystem and works well. It's been around for a long time and is something MSFT actually did well. Pity it isn't open sourced.

  • marcmmarcm Member

    What @raindog308 said plus the fact that it's the only one currently available on Windows, so it's not like we have a choice, lol.

  • IntcsIntcs Member
    edited May 2013

    @raindog308 said: Blah blah blah - NTFS is a fine filesystem and works well. It's been around for a long time and is something MSFT actually did well. Pity it isn't open sourced.

    Not if you googled enough (hence, when only you have a failure you figure out) , the solution is CHKDSK, then when it doesn't work it's eventually after days (or weeks) of searching, either fixed with manually editing the disk bits and try fixing it, or eventually restoring data using a file restore tool, which (best of it) I figured for limitation related to disk fragmentation, can't restore all file structure and there must be inconvenience. As I mentioned google is filled with similar stuff, hell even Youtube :p

  • @marcm said: plus the fact that it's the only one currently available on Windows

    You didn't hear of ReFS? Given that MS doesn't support it as a boot volume.

  • DamianDamian Member

    Man, I've been using NTFS since ~1996 and haven't encountered all of this fraddlypratt mentioned here....

  • IntcsIntcs Member
    edited May 2013

    @Damian said: Man, I've been using NTFS since ~1996 and haven't encountered all of this fraddlypratt mentioned here....

    That's what I had, I summed it to (might) make someone take a step to secure their NTFS especially "large" volumes, ie regular backups. BTW, both of failed drives are USB connected drives! :(

  • Awmusic12635Awmusic12635 Member, Host Rep

    Considering how large and widespread Windows is, of course there will be horror stories. Comes with the scale. I have personally not had any of these issues either.

  • @OP....nice try Richard Stallman.

    I have used just about every type of file system there is and they all have their issues and shortcomings no matter if the file system is open source or a MS product. At work and on a daily basis, we have 10's of terabytes of data moving/residing on NTFS file systems without a hitch. And if there are any problems, then 99% of the time, there is some underlying hardware issues that contributed.

    Right now, I have sitting next to me right now, a 1 GB ext4 formatted drive that the file system is messed up and data unrecoverable...but that is why reliable backup systems are in place and those backups are randomly checked/verified on a weekly basis...no matter the file system.

  • DamianDamian Member

    @Intcs said: BTW, both of failed drives are USB connected drives! :(

    Might have something to do with it....

  • ZinnVPSZinnVPS Member

    The op u solved your own problem already bad hdds so it is not ntfs lol

  • MCHPhilMCHPhil Member
    edited May 2013

    Honestly sounds to me like the op removed the drives with out properly disconnecting them from the PC. Personally I've never actually lost data from a NTFS (edit: or any other FS) drive used properly. With proper backups etc, backups usually aren't even needed. Just a quick data recovery program and your settled. (IF the drive isn't toast itself... this is when that backup you "were" keeping comes into play :P)

  • bcrlsnbcrlsn Member

    @Intcs: BTW, both of failed drives are USB connected drives! :(

    @Damian: Might have something to do with it....

    @Damian is right about that! I've only really had USB drives fail for me. I have had internal drives fail, but they've usually been part of a RAID so I was fine. USB controller cards can be pretty flaky.

  • IntcsIntcs Member
    edited May 2013

    @ZinnVPS said: The op u solved your own problem already bad hdds so it is not ntfs lol

    Both are perfectly fine, and one that failed earlier is a 1.5 tb that was rarely used/accessed.

    As for NTFS, it isn't bad in its working, read/write/partition/etc! I depend on it too, like I used for native encryption using other tools, and it worked nice. However, fixing of errors is too limited, and CHKDSK rarely works/reads disks to begin with.

    When you have an issue hapened out of nothing and discover how limited are fixing chances, you likely gets angry at that. I do agree on disk backups as the ultimate solution.

    As for ext3 and ext4 I thought it's much more reliable, and successful fixing of corrupted disks on servers -which is way more common- still seems to work most of the time.

  • shovenoseshovenose Member, Host Rep

    Um... never had a problem with any filesystem unless you did something stupid or your hardware is crap or faulty.

  • MCHPhilMCHPhil Member
    edited May 2013

    Disk errors don't just show up out of nowhere. If you have disk errors your drives are going bad. This is where those backups come into play. If the data is that important.

    EXT3/4 is going to have the same issue if it comes down to disk errors.

    Though, as others have stated, USB controllers can be finicky. I'd be more inclined to remove the USB enclosures and check the disks while having them plugged directly to the motherboard.

    Just a good idea also, if your going to try and repair the drive and you have no backups (or even if you do). Create a disk image of the drive before doing anything else with it. That way if the drive is degrading etc. The hope is you can get an image before the drive is non recoverable.

    (Hell I've done this in the past and just restored the image onto a fresh new drive and not had any other errors.)

  • @Intcs said: both of failed drives are USB connected drives

    That explains, usually started with faulty file allocation table.

  • WilliamWilliam Member

    NTFS is fine, working as expected, sure not the fastest but certainly since many years stable.

    However, i have to complain about the Windows Kernel Software RAID1, it only writes the bootloader to one disk and entirely removes any sense for RAID1 for system drives...

  • IntcsIntcs Member

    I must agree with all of you it must be related to USB and probably frequent connect/disconnect, I had a 40gb 2.5 usb drive that was externally connected to a P3 desktop, but was acting like a local disk as it was rarely disconnected, and it worked for close to 4 years without file system errors. Errors seems common on flash disks as well, but those are expected and usually tolerable.
    Ironically I always safely remove and kill any process still accessing disk, while people who just pulls cables seems to not have as much issues :)

  • jeffjeff Member

    @William said: However, i have to complain about the Windows Kernel Software RAID1, it only writes the bootloader to one disk and entirely removes any sense for RAID1 for system drives...

    Can you expand on this element from the link two posts above... it goes on to say...
    "Mirror - This is a mirror set without striping or parity by duplicating data on two or three disks, similar to RAID 1."

    Three disks RAID1?

  • mikhomikho Member, Host Rep

    image

  • MunMun Member

    Actually as a computer tech for a school district I have had little to no issues with NTFS, but more over windows itself which freaks out because of our setup.

    Long story short NTFS isn't your issue, windows is.

  • IntcsIntcs Member
    edited May 2013

    Honestly, that's how I've actually looked in some days during the weeks where I've been trying (and insisting) to get it to work back without needing to go through a quaking ie classical recovery process. To the importance of data (this time around!) I've nearly went through every method that even a perfectly working boot sector and MBR was written to same disk to no avail, after weeks issue looked so far as being minimized to some -big- MFT errors.

    Hence I haven't been even following LET for sometime as I had close to no time out of that issue. NOW recovering close to three hundred thousand files! located in over twenty thousand folders :$

    And I'm still considering something to try for a substitute file system, to test on my storage drives.

    In either case, a daily backup scheme is activated here!

  • ConnorlConnorl Member
    edited May 2013

    @Damian said: ~1996

    That would happen to be before I was born. Feel Old?

  • WilliamWilliam Member

    @jeff said: Three disks RAID1?

    What? As a RAID1 is just duplication you can use as many drives as you want until you run out of ports.

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    @Intcs said: Not if you googled enough

    If you "google enough" you'll find lots of people who say Linux sucks.

    Does Linux suck?

  • joepie91joepie91 Member, Patron Provider

    If you really think NTFS is a good filesystem, try copying 3000 files of 5KB to another place on the disk. Then try the same on an ext3 or ext4 filesystem.

    Post results.

  • kbeeziekbeezie Member

    Well there's exFAT if you need both the OSX and Windows compatibility with file sizes above 4GB... only problem I've seen, is due to the licensing with microsoft, not all devices support it yet.

    @joepie91 said: If you really think NTFS is a good filesystem, try copying 3000 files of 5KB to another place on the disk. Then try the same on an ext3 or ext4 filesystem.

    Kind of pointless since you're not going to read ext4 drive on most typical systems, especially for typical end users. Like saying HFS+ in a way would be superior... but can't really use it effectively outside of a mac.

    right now I'm only seeing exFAT as being a viable alternative for compatibility and for file size, just the default block size is pretty up there so you lose some space for the sake of performance.

    PS: How many people complaining just left the partition at the "default" block size?

  • kbeeziekbeezie Member

    PS: For Windows internal storage, I still think NTFS is the best way to go (but I prefer exFAT for external storage as I use both Windows and OSX locally).

  • IntcsIntcs Member
    edited May 2013

    Thanks to all, really appreciate your inputs, as for @kbeezie, looks nice and might help, but I'll definitely have a look on exFAT and even a way to mount ext4 on Windows, so thanks for noting that =)

    PS: How many people complaining just left the partition at the "default" block size?

    Don't recall formatting myself any of the two failed drives, one that failed earlier (1.5TB) and also current (0.5TB) , both has a single partition that -most likely- was the one I've purchased them formatted with, I've took a full image of them upon purchase so I didn't need format usually except if changing partition structure which didn't happen.
    The 500gb has a default allocation of 4096 bytes (8 sec per cluster), and had a single volume taking all space. The same goes for the 1.5tb drive.

Sign In or Register to comment.