@muxtau191 That site is written by a scumbag who sells Paragon software via his cash referral link. Gee I "wonder" why Paragon won? He has about 5 or 10 other website domains with the same reviews and the same "Don't buy Tuxera. Buy Paragon! It is better... [with my referral code so I earn money when you buy it via me]".
**** that guy. If Tuxera had also been
sleazy enough to run an affiliate-link pyramid scheme (
like Paragon sleazily does; "make money with the Paragon affiliate program, the more you sell each month the higher commission you earn for that month!"), then that douchebag would
definitely be marketing Tuxera too. But he can
only earn money by marketing Paragon. He
loses money if people buy Tuxera instead. And he makes
more money (up to 50% of each sale for
that month) if he succeeds in tricking
enough fools into buying Paragon licenses
via him every month so that he reaches the higher "sales commission levels" for that month. So he has registered
loads of domains and posted
totally fake, very negative Tuxera reviews full of lies and slander, telling everyone to buy Paragon instead ("helpfully" via
his affiliate-cash link). Sigh. Sleazy scumbags (Paragon) will always be scumbags and attract other scumbags (that fake-reviewing, affiliate-spamming website guy) to each other.
[doublepost=1481312051][/doublepost]I think it's time for an unbiased, technical review for a change:
Paragon:
- Their NTFS driver is pretty stable now, but it has taken a long time to get there with lots of very buggy versions in the past.
- Their ExtFS driver is still very buggy and corrupts the Linux filesystem frequently.
- Each license is tied to 1 computer. That's all. Nothing more allowed. You cannot use it on multiple computers. They use a sleazy, hardware-locked activation check with online DRM activation.
- Every year they release a new "major" version, but all they ever add is support for the new Apple macOS version. And they still charge their users a full upgrade cost every year as if that was a "major" upgrade.
- They now offer a "UFSD Value Pack" for $49.99 which has their 4 drivers (NTFS and ExtFS for Mac, HFS+ and ExtFS for Windows) along with lifetime free upgrades, plus their free and incredibly terrible and risky NTFS-HFS converter (which insanely converts the filesystem format live without doing any backups, so if your computer crashes while it isn't finished converting, then you're stuck with a disk that's half-NTFS, half-Mac, and can say bye bye to your data!). I guess they realized nobody was buying their expensive, buggy garbage with sleazy yearly upgrade fees anymore, so they bundled it all into one giant sh|t-pile to try to sell it one last time. They even frequently have sales on the value pack, for about $38... Geeze, they're really trying hard to milk this sick cow!
- Completely closed-source, and therefore nobody else can look at/find/fix their huge pile of bugs in their filesystem code. And you want to trust that buggy "black box" with your important FILESYSTEM data!? No thanks!
- Paragon as a company are sleazy scumbags. They constantly shove disgusting "promotions", coupons and spam-like email offers into your throats, and they recruit disgusting affiliates via their pyramid scheme, which is why the web is full of fake reviews trying to trick fools into buying Paragon via their affiliate cash links.
- They force you to install disgusting "extras" like "Paragon Software Facebook Agent" on your computer. Does that sound like something you'd want your NTFS driver to install?
- After they've taken your money, they do not answer any difficult support questions with any kind of competency. Customers attest that they just ignore you if there are issues beyond their comprehension. Literally: When it gets too difficult for them, they will run away.
Tuxera: http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/
- The authors of NTFS-3G. The community-based, open-source NTFS driver that powers the NTFS readers/writers in countless Android smartphones and other portable devices with card/USB readers. It also powers NTFS support on desktop Linux. With that MASSIVE project as their backbone, you can TRUST that ANY bugs in their NTFS code have a lot of eyes on them and are found by tons of worldwide developers and then fixed quickly!
- In case I am not being clear enough: Massive, community-developed, open-source software like NTFS-3G leads to a product that's extremely well-tested and stable, and that's one of many reasons why Tuxera is a METRIC ****TON HIGHER-QUALITY than Paragon. With Tuxera you will get MORE STABILITY and LESS RISK of data corruption. Because a LOT of Linux nerds rely on NTFS-3G for their daily lives, and any bugs are quickly found and fixed. That's unlike Paragon's terrible, buggy, closed-source "black hole" mystery driver. Most software is better as closed-source (since it gives financial incentive to perfect the software). But something as life-critical as a file-system driver to store all of your precious DATA is NEVER good as closed-source! A filesystem NEEDS to be open and needs to have a lot of developers looking at it to ensure it is safe and stable. THAT reason alone is a great reason to FOREVER AVOID PARAGON like the plague!
- For 8 years, Tuxera released NTFS-3G for free before going commercial as Tuxera. It's still the exact same company. They were not "bought out". It's the same people, and they just renamed the company.
- They are the ones who forced Paragon to lower their prices. Before that, Paragon NTFS cost $100. Now Paragon was forced to lower to $19.95 (but that's per-computer, and then you still need to pay its upgrade-costs for every computer every year, haha).
- Tuxera NTFS for Mac is only 25 EUR ($31) as a life-time license for 1 person on as many computers as you own (unlimited)! That means free upgrades on as many computers as you want! Forever! There is no sleazy "upgrade" scheme every year. There is no sleazy "1 computer" online-DRM activation scheme. There's just total freedom to enjoy super-high quality NTFS read/write support on Mac for the rest of your life! And yes, these guys will remain in business for the rest of your life. They're a massive company and are the market leaders in embedded filesystem drivers for things like Android. Tuxera will definitely be around in the future. (As for Paragon? I am not so sure about them existing even as little as 10 years from now. They're a sinking ship. Their products stink, and well-informed customers aren't buying Paragon's garbage anymore.)
- These Tuxera guys are massive nerds and extremely competent and understand your support queries if you ever have any.
- They began the NTFS-3G project, and then went commercial with all of their filesystem expertise. If they hadn't gone commercial, NTFS-3G would have died due to lacking funding. Now, thanks to being a commercial company, they still develop and release the free NTFS-3G driver (for those who don't want the best performance). It is still the core of their own driver, and all of the free components are freely available, with full source code and community developer involvement.
- Tuxera has now grown to having offices in 4 or 5 locations around the world, and have branched out to supporting tons of other filesystems. Their code is extremely reliable and high-performance.
- Tuxera NTFS is based on NTFS-3G, but with lots of their own proprietary performance and quality enhancements, and a very beautiful GUI, ease of use and a powerful built-in disk manager for checking/repairing NTFS disk errors via Mac (going to Windows to do "chkdsk /F" is no longer needed).
- In 2015 they released "Tuxera Disk Manager" which lets you format, check and repair your NTFS disks directly from macOS. Excellent!
- They have great macOS integration. Auto-mounting of disks. Great System Preferences integration. Etc.
- I know people who use Tuxera exclusively and write tons of Virtual Machine backups and other things daily, and it works perfectly and never corrupts any data.
- There are NO LIMITS to the maximum number of files, folders, file sizes or partition sizes. You can go as big as you want via the Tuxera NTFS driver! You can go America-sized! Any other claims are just total lies by people trying to market Paragon via their affiliate links.
- There are no data corruption issues. To corrupt a disk, you would have to personally do something really stupid like unplugging the disk in the middle of a write, or unplugging your computer's power cable while it's writing. And if that happens, you can always rescue yourself from your own stupidity by running "Tuxera Disk Manager" to do an NTFS repair. All from within macOS. Safe, easy and convenient!
- Stores macOS file metadata in NTFS "Extended Attributes" metadata fields, meaning that your NTFS drives won't become littered by "._[name]" AppleDouble files.
- Read/write performance is extremely high. Even SSD speeds are supported. Supports extremely fast write speeds. As an example, this is the benchmark of their NTFS driver for MOBILE (cellphone) CPUs, getting ~200 MB/s writes ON A CELLPHONE: http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-embedded/. Now imagine what their desktop CPU driver for Mac can do! ;-)
- But don't trust my word for it. Here's something better than any user's review: Every second, 3 devices powered by Tuxera drivers are shipped out from factories worldwide. In other words, every month, about 7.9 MILLION devices are shipped out, containing Tuxera drivers. Can you say "Eat our dusty farts, Paragon"!? ;-)
Lastly, the free alternative to both, would be to use: OSXFuse + NTFS-3G
- Only recommended for total nerds with very low requirements. To install it requires lots of command line work: Installing osxfuse via a package, then installing the homebrew package manager, then installing the ntfs-3g package, then disabling Apple's system integrity protection, then re-linking Apple's "mount_ntfs" to the ntfs-3g version so that NTFS is mounted read-write from then on... And you will never have any nice GUI or utilities. And it messes up your Startup Disk panel so that your BootCamp volume never shows up anymore. And this driver offers very bad performance. So yeah, if all of that sounds like a good day to you, then have fun!
- Very low write-performance because of the way it writes to the hard disk device (https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/wiki/NTFS-3G#1-why-is-ntfs-3gs-write-performance-so-poor). On OSX, there is no caching of the writes in osxfuse+ntfs-3g mode, so you will have very, veeery slow writes. If that sounds okay to you, then it's acceptable for occasional use. But definitely not as a daily-use driver if you need NTFS a lot!
- The NTFS-3G driver had experimental (buggy) write-caching half a decade ago (UBLIO caching) for much higher write performance, but that was just an early prototype of the code and it's not available in the newer NTFS-3G versions! To fund development, they put the finished, STABLE version of write-caching support into the Tuxera commercial product instead (along with many other massive speed enhancements). Therefore, high read/write performance is exclusively available in Tuxera NTFS!
- Here's a very old benchmark (from December 4th, 2009) which compared the then-brand-new Tuxera against the NTFS-3G for Mac driver, to answer questions by people who wanted to know the difference: http://www.tuxera.com/mac/tuxera_ntfs_vs_ntfs-3g.pdf. The speed difference is even bigger today. And as you can see, even if you had the risky, buggy caching-prototype code enabled in NTFS-3G (and that's an optimization that's no longer available in NTFS-3G today), then it was still much slower than the oldest version of Tuxera. Imagine Tuxera's speed advantage today, after over half a decade of advancements and optimizations!
Conclusion, in
one word:
Tuxera.
'nuff said.
Only thing is to check compatibility with your current OS/hardware. In the time I bought it, one can download a demo/trial. Maybe doing it is worth, I think....
