Windows 10 Pro for Advanced PCs comes with a replacement for the classic NTFS file system

Last night, we reported that three new Windows 10 SKUs were revealed through Windows 10 Build 16212 pkeyconfig. We speculated that Windows 10 Pro for Advanced PCs will presumably have licensing and optimisations targeted to the powerful multi-core PCs with masses of RAM and petabyte hard drives. Few hours back, Microsoft’s official documentation on Windows 10 Pro for Advanced PCs got leaked on Twitter. The slide refers to “Windows 10 Pro for Advanced PCs” as “Windows 10 Pro for Workstation PCs”, it is a placeholder name for the same. For the initial release of Windows 10 Pro for Workstation, Microsoft is focusing on the below 4 key features, including the new ReFS file system that was introduced with Windows Server 2012.

• Workstation Mode: Microsoft will optimize the OS to provide peak performance and reliability in graphics and compute intensive use cases when the Workstation mode is engaged by the users.
• Resilient file system: ReFS is the successor of NTFS, which has been a mainstay of Windows for past several years. ReFS is designed for fault-tolerance, optimized for handling large data volume, auto-correcting and much more at the same time backward compatible with NTFS.
• Faster file sharing: Microsoft is including the SMBDirect protocol based file sharing in Windows 10 Pro for Workstation which allows for high throughput, low latency and low CPU utilization when accessing network shares
• Expanded hardware support: Microsoft is expanding hardware support in Windows 10 Pro for Workstation. Users will now be able to run Windows 10 Pro for Workstation on machines with up to 4 CPUs (todays limit of 2), and add memory up to 6TB.

Microsoft is in discussions with their advanced users, and will continue to bring more features to this high-end segment of the market.