Microsoft REFS Network Drive

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SHARE ATTRIBUTE TYPE VALUE

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shows

SERVER_NAME janku.polakoff.us

USER_ID 502

SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB1_ENABLED

SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB2_ENABLED

SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB3_ENABLED

SMB_VERSION SMB_3.02

SMB_SHARE_TYPE DISK

SIGNING_SUPPORTED TRUE

EXTENDED_SECURITY_SUPPORTED TRUE

LARGE_FILE_SUPPORTED TRUE

CLIENT_REQUIRES_SIGNING TRUE

FILE_IDS_SUPPORTED TRUE

DFS_SUPPORTED TRUE

FILE_LEASING_SUPPORTED TRUE

MULTI_CREDIT_SUPPORTED TRUE

DIR_LEASING_SUPPORTED TRUE

ENCRYPTION_SUPPORTED TRUE

SIGNING_ON TRUE

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I'm having similar problems writing to a server with SMB 3.02 enabled. Files will fail to copy reporting a network failure when going from MacOS to ReFS on the windows side and from the MacOS side they copy over as zero byte files that can only be removed from the Windows server side of things.

OK it seems the title of this question is a bit misleading.

Microsoft ReFS is a new file system intended as an improvement over NTFS. ReFS stands for Resilient File System. It is nothing per say to do with networking and being a network file server. The relationship to a network file server comes from the fact that it is intended to be mainly used by duh! servers. ReFS was introduced with WIndows Server 2012.

I supposed one could consider NTFS equivalent to Apple's HFS+ and one could consider ReFS equivalent to Apple' forthcoming APFS.

As far as I am aware there are no Mac or Linux drivers to allow access to ReFS. This is not the fault of Linux or Apple it is down to the fact that ReFS is a proprietary format created and owned by Apple. It should be noted that NTFS itself is also a proprietary format created and owned by Microsoft and Microsoft also have not officially released the specifications to NTFS either. However since NTFS has been around much longer there has been more time and interest by software companies working independently on reverse engineering the NFTS format.

Clearly you will need to wait for a company to achieve the same for ReFS although there is the risk Microsoft may sue companies trying to do this.

Since in the Apple world a company called Paragon Software is the leading developer and supplier of a driver to add support for NTFS to the Mac I would suggest the most likely chance of someone doing this for Macs would be Paragon, in fact they seem to have already made steps in this direction.

See - http://blog.paragon-software.com/refs-support-added-to-paragon-universal-file-sy stem-drivers/

It is not yet complete and therefore not on sale as yet. You will have to keep monitoring their website.

PS. A Mac or a Windows PC accessing a Windows 2012 Server over the network i.e. as a file server does not need to know or use ReFS because as I pointed out in my previous reply, when you access a network file server you do so using a network protocol. The server is responsible for translating the commands. So a Mac should be able to access a Windows Server using ReFS. DFS is a different matter this is a network protocol which therefore would have an effect on Mac clients, however even this is not a problem since Macs support DFS as well as standard SMB. Accessing ReFS only impacts Macs if you want to plug a ReFS formatted disk in to a Mac directly and use the contents of the disk.

sc46 wrote:

We are NOT talking about direct access to Windows formatted disks, but to network shared folder from Server 2012 R2 via cifs://

How many times do I have to answer this?

Macs can access Windows file servers over the network using SMB and CIFS which are for all intents and purposes the same thing. Macs can also access distributed Windows file shares using DFS which is an extension to SMB/CIFS.

ReFS is nothing to do with networking, it is a local hard disk format like NTFS. There is no such thing as a ReFS network drive, there is a local ReFS formatted drive, and there is a SMB/CIFS network file server, they are two separate things.

Here is Microsoft's own technical article confirming this - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh848060%28v=vs.85%29.a spx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

Note: This difference between a network system and a local disk format is the same for Mac servers. Mac servers use AFP for the network protocol, and a Mac server usually uses HFS+ as the disk format on the Mac server. They are totally different things. This is why it is possible for a Mac to be a SMB server using a HFS+ disk, and why a Linux server can be an AFP server using an Ext4 Linux formatted disk. Just because a Windows network file server uses ReFS for its local disk format does not make ReFS a network protocol. The local disk format is completely hidden from all network clients.

A network client such as a Mac uses SMB aka CIFS to access a Windows server, it has no need to know about what disk format the Windows server is using.

Macs have been able to access Windows network file servers for years and still are able to do so.

You appear to be inventing a problem that does not exist.

sc46 wrote:

Yes, access to ReFS formatted share via cifs:// does indeed work, but for whatever reason Mac only writes files under 4Gb FAT limit to that destination. Anything over 4Gb & tit is no possible to write there. EXACTLY as the very first YEAR old post described!

I never would use any Paragon software on Mac, I trust Tuxera.

ReFS would NOT be practical on USB media, so no issue to discuss at all in that respect

Right, ReFS is nothing to do with this.

If the Mac will not transfer over the network files greater than 4GB then this is purely an SMB/CIFS issue. Both NTFS and ReFS support files bigger than 4GB, as I have stated the local disk format is nothing to do with networking and is completely hidden from the network clients.

If the Mac cannot transfer files bigger than 4GB over the network to the server then this is a Mac network client issue. As the original post stated Yosemite was being used then the network client is the Apple SMBX software which Apple wrote to replace the SAMBA client they previously used. Each new version of OS X from Apple has continued to improve SMBX so maybe the version in El Capitan or now Sierra will help with this issue.

If Sierra still causes you this problem then the fault is I would feel with Apple's SMB client i.e. their SMBX software and the only way this will be solved is if you and others report this directly to Apple as a bug.

It is nothing to do with ReFS.

Note: Apple's latest SMBX client supports SMB v3.2

You can force the Mac to use an older version of the SMB protocol e.g. 2 or 1 but typically they are slower, e.g. by editing the /etc/nsmb.conf file which you might have to first create. You can test what version is being used when you connect to a SMB share by first connecting to that share and then in Terminal.app typing the following command.

smbutil statshares -a

(I think it is safe to assume a Windows PC does not have this problem and hence the problem is also not with the Windows server and therefore it is a Mac issue.)

For the more advanced a possible option is to install SAMBA yourself in to OS X and in effect replace Apple's SMBX software. See http://eduo.info/apps/smbup

Macs can't write to NTFS without using 3rd party software, so if REFS is like NTFS, that is what is causing your problem. Try formatting the drive as MS DOS or Ex-Fat.

When a Mac accesses a drive from a network server the file system format is not applicable because that is 'hidden' by the networking software. Effectively the networking software becomes the file system.

What software are you using to share the drive? It could be the networking software is not yet aware of the capabilities of a REFS file system and is therefore for safety assuming the lowest common denominator of FAT32 which has a file size limit of 4GB. As an example I have a Windows PC with an Apple HFS+ formatted drive connected to it, even though HFS+ supports terabyte size files, Windows because it does not recognise the format directly is flagging a warning, it is only a warning though because the HFS+ driver does work with bigger files. (I am using MacDrive.)

In general terms using exFAT is the best choice for sharing a drive between a Mac and a PC however this format is as mentioned nothing to do with networking and exFAT is not usable for boot drives, it would be fine for normal external drives. Both Mac an PC can read and write to exFAT.

Update: I see ReFS is aimed at Windows 2012 servers, it would not therefore be applicable to general external drive use. Again in theory the SMB service running in Server 2012 on top of ReFS should hide any worries as far as a network client is concerned.

Normally on a Mac client you use a URL like smb://server/share a tip that sometimes helps is to use cifs://server/share instead.

Hello seacap88,

Can you run a little Terminal command for us? While your Windows drive is mounted, run the following:

smbutil statshares -a

This will indicate what version of the SMB file sharing protocol you are using.

Anybody?

Or is it one of the many issues that can not be answered in these forums? (nobody knows?)

Hello sc46,

Issues can certainly be answered in these forums, but if the original poster walks away, everyone else follows. If you have a specific question, I suggest you start your own thread on the topic. Trying to piggy-back on a thread from last year is just going to get you ignored.

Title us not misleading and there is NO need to open another thread that is IDENTICAL to the original one (why duplicate?)

As to whether anything can be answered, feel free to see all my threads unanswered after years

Seb

We are NOT talking about direct access to Windows formatted disks, but to network shared folder from Server 2012 R2 via cifs://

Yes, access to ReFS formatted share via cifs:// does indeed work, but for whatever reason Mac only writes files under 4Gb FAT limit to that destination. Anything over 4Gb & tit is no possible to write there. EXACTLY as the very first YEAR old post described!

I never would use any Paragon software on Mac, I trust Tuxera.

ReFS would NOT be practical on USB media, so no issue to discuss at all in that respect

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And how can I describe more clearly that Mac can not write files over 4Gb to ReFS share?

That is NOT Windows server restriction because from Windows and/or Linux client one can write same file perfectly over network (but NOT from Mac!)

I will completely disagree with your statement: ReFS is nothing to do with this

It has ALL to do it it. Same server, NTFS formatted share = NO issue

It is to do with fact that Mac "sees" ReFS destination as filesystem that does not allow size bigger than 4Gb

It has been like that ever since ReFS first appeared & (at least in Yosemite) it was never fixed by Apple.

But ReFS is also problematic to ie NFS (exports can be done, but most software connecting to such share also does not know what hit it)

I have already provided (above) output of smbutil statshares -a