Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Ntfs-3g

H

hypervish89

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 6, 2010
143
10
Hey Guys, first off I'd like to say thanks for all of the information already on this forum that's helped greatly!! I'd also like to say sorry, If I'm posting this in the wrong section. I come on to website everyday for at least 2-3 hrs but never post, or even bother to log-in... hopefully that will change... but anyways to the point of which I'm here posting.....

I'm currently using the NTFS-3G driver on my mac, is there anything else out there that has the same functionality but is faster... because it takes forever to delete multiple files... I do HD Video editing (1080p), so It would be nice to have it transfer/delete faster...

Once again, thanks so much!!
 
Why not format the drive as HFS+, if you need faster performance? Do you share the drive with one Windows PC? Several Windows PCs?

FAT32 (File Allocation Table)
  • Read/Write FAT32 from both native Windows and native Mac OS X.
  • Maximum file size: 4GB.
  • Maximum volume size: 2TB
NTFS (Windows NT File System)
  • Read/Write NTFS from native Windows.
  • Read only NTFS from native Mac OS X
  • To Read/Write/Format NTFS from Mac OS X: Install NTFS-3G for Mac OS X (free)
  • Some have reported problems using Tuxera (approx 33USD).
  • Native NTFS support can be enabled in Snow Leopard, but is not advisable, due to instability.
  • Maximum file size: 16 TB
  • Maximum volume size: 256TB
HFS+ (Hierarchical File System, a.k.a. Mac OS Extended)
  • Read/Write HFS+ from native Mac OS X
  • Required for Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner backups of Mac internal hard drive.
  • To Read/Write HFS+ from Windows, Install MacDrive
  • To Read HFS+ (but not Write) from Windows, Install HFSExplorer
  • Maximum file size: 8EiB
  • Maximum volume size: 8EiB
exFAT (FAT64)
  • Supported in Mac OS X only in 10.6.5 or later.
  • exFAT partitions created with OS X 10.6.5 are inaccessible from Windows 7
  • Not all Windows versions support exFAT. See disadvantages.
  • exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table)
  • Maximum file size: 16 EiB
  • Maximum volume size: 64 ZiB
 
Unfortunately I have to use stupid Window's PC's quite often, so I can't go solely htfs...One partition on my external is already htfs the one for time machine, but the other data partition is ntfs.
 
There's also Paragon NTFS, which might be faster than Tuxera, but it's hard to say for sure which one is better and less buggy. For me, stability is more important than speed (but NTFS-3G is really slow, and probably least stable)

Paragon costs $20 and they have a trial available
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

Here's a test from early 2010 comparing Paragon, Tuxera, and NTFS-3G. Most of the graphs are useless and impossible to interpret (3D graphs are no good), but if you scroll to the bottom the summary along with a summary graph is helpful. There seem to be issues with both Tuxera and Paragon, but from this it sounds like Paragon is the way to go (and presumably they fixed some of the issues in the RC version now that version 8 is officially released).

Here's an old forum post detailing some of the issues with Tuxera
http://www.tuxera.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1740
I'm guessing many of these have been fixed by now.

I am currently using NTFS-3G, but I find it too slow. I'm too lazy to do a detailed comparison of Paragon and Tuxera myself, so I'll probably just pick one (likely Paragon at this point) or stick with NTFS-3G since its free. My biggest concern with Paragon is that Tuxera is more popular, thus likely better supported.

Edit: I'm sure all of this has been discussed before. Try searching the forum.
 
If someone hands me a drive I can't use exfat.

Even on eSATA, NTFS-3G is slow. I recently used a drive on eSATA on Windows and I could get 60 MB/sec, but on my Mac with NTFS-3G, I could only get like 10-20MB/sec. The drive was constantly seeking and making lots of noise, whereas my HFS+ drives make virtually no seeking noise when they are writing big files. I don't remember how much seeking this drive did on Windows.

With my drives, HFS+ formatted and connected by eSATA I can get 120 MB/sec or more reading and writing large files. Even Firewire 800 isn't that fast. I wonder why anyone would still use USB2.0 for anything but simple devices anymore.
 
I started with NTFS-3G I couldn't stand it. Buggy and slow.
It messed up some NTFS drives. They started having errors. It sometimes just created random really high cpu load. When spotlight didn't exclude all ntfs partitions and with excludes it killed battery life for no apperant reason. Write speed was terrible with only a few single digit MB/s to a USB harddrive.

Never tried Tuxera but Paragon's driver works quite well. At least it is not buggy. Write speed is tremendously faster than with NTFS-3G. I never really checked it (OSX doesn't display much details, it is more of a guessing game) but it probably comes close to the USB 2.0 speeds that limit it anyway.

I once read something about mounting NTFS drives in OSX as readable. It seems to be possible but is off by default. Maybe you want to try this. Question did they not enable it by default because it has bugs or because off marketing doesn't like it if it is too easy to use NTFS.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back