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

NTFS or HFS?

C

CountlovE

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 17, 2007
144
0
I ordered a new Mac Pro. I am going to have a 240gig SSD with a split partition of 120 Gigs for Windows 7 running NTFS, and a OSX 10.6 partition with 120 gigs with HFS.

My question is this. It will also have a 2TB 7200rpm drive installed. I want to install both OSX, and Windows applications on the 2TB drive.

I will be using the 64bit Kernel of OSX so NTFS-3G from Tuxera will be out of the question since it only works in 32bit Kernel, and the non Tuxera version is slow from what I read. That leaves me with keeping the 2TB drive in HFS format and using the latest Mac Drive in Windows 7.

My question is, will I have have native speed in windows 7 using mac drive v8? What is my best option?

Thanks!
 
MacDrive is a lot faster reading and writing to NTFS formatted volumes than NTFS-3G is able to read and write to NTFS formatted volumes. As I only used it with external HDDs (USB and Firewire), I can't vouch for native speeds though, which should be around 95MB/s in benchmarks and copying processes.
 
spinnerlys said:
MacDrive is a lot faster reading and writing to NTFS formatted volumes than NTFS-3G is able to read and write to NTFS formatted volumes. As I only used it with external HDDs (USB and Firewire), I can't vouch for native speeds though, which should be around 95MB/s in benchmarks and copying processes.
Click to expand...

You mean MacDrive in Windows 7 writing to HFS?
 
CountlovE said:
You mean MacDrive in Windows 7 writing to HFS?
Click to expand...

With "MacDrive" I meant MacDrive version 8 (the trial) and I used it on Windows XP last week and got good speeds via USB (30MB/s ?) to an HFS+ (not Journaled) formatted HDD (western digital my studio 1TB edition).

It shouldn't really differ or at least not be slower on Windows 6.1.
 
30 MBs a second? What should I bet getting if I am using a Serial ATA Drive in a mac pro?
 
CountlovE said:
I'm gonna try Paragon for OSX. That looks like a winner.. Thanks for your help!

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/product_performance.html
Click to expand...

If you go by the charts, then please notice they are in Megabit (Mb) and not MegaByte (MB), thus divide the numbers they show you there by 8 and you get MB.

Write speeds in Megabit (Mb), MB = Mb/8
performance-test-wright.png

Read speeds in Megabit (Mb), MB = Mb/8
performance-test-read.png
Click to expand...

I once tried Paragon and didn't get satisfying results, something around 5 to 8 MB/s, and I had to copy 20GB or more.
 
Damn.. Then what is the best way to get native speeds? Do I just split the HD in 2 partitions having NTFS for Windows and HFS for mac programs then?
 
Windows and OSX with a MacPro. HD/SSD question

So I put in an Apple order for a 3.3ghz 6 core with the 2 TB drive. I then purchased a 240 OWC drive with docking station.

I plan on splitting the partition on the SSD and use it as a boot drive so 50 percent space is HFS, and 50 is NTFS for Windows 7.

Now I am stuck with the 2TB drive to load large programs like STEAM games, Aperture libraries, FCP files etc. Thing is, I want to share that 2TB drive so it works well at native speed in Windows 7 and OSX. If I format it HFS, I can use MacDrive in Windows, but does the speed degrade? Will everything running off it be slower that running a native file format? I could do 1TB NTFS, and 1TB HFS but I was hoping to avoid that.

Curious to know what someone else would do.
 
This sounds like a really bad idea...

Either partition or get another drive. You REALLY don't want to be mixing Windows and Mac app data on the same drive, especially on non native file formats.

Booting from an external drive is also not the best idea. If you can, I'd move that OWC SSD inside the Mac Pro. Going over any sort of external bus is going to give you a speed hit.
 
My NTFS drives are not accessible in the default 64 bit mode of the new mac pro. If I hold the 3 and 2 keys down and boot in 32 but mode the NTFS drives are seen.
 
CountlovE said:
I will be using the 64bit Kernel of OSX so NTFS-3G from Tuxera will be out of the question since it only works in 32bit Kernel, and the non Tuxera version is slow from what I read. That leaves me with keeping the 2TB drive in HFS format and using the latest Mac Drive in Windows 7.
Click to expand...
The high-performance Tuxera NTFS for Mac supports 64-bit OS X kernels since version 2010.9-RC:
http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/

It's 15 days trial. We expect to complete the 64-bit kernel support for the free NTFS-3G too latest next month.

Regards,

Szabolcs Szakacsits
Chief Software Architect
Tuxera Inc.
 
Szaka said:
We expect to complete the 64-bit kernel support for the free NTFS-3G too latest next month.
Click to expand...

That's great news! I saw the post on Erik Larsson's blog about 64 bit in the Tuxera version, and was hoping for this in NTFS-3G also. :D
 
I would steer clear of paragon to be honest. Ive had lots of problems with their software. It wont uninstall (you have to download a python script to fully erase it and its effectiveness is a bit dubious). It also is a bit slow, nothing show stopping, but not nearly as fast as HFS file transfers. I just get the sense also, given the weird issues I've had crop up as a direct result of installing their software, that their testing and QA is not very thorough. Their support is also not very responsive.

When I upgraded to Snow leopard, I was eventually forced to do a Clean install because the old version of Paragon was not compatible and while it worked, it caused serious delays at both startup and shutdown (like upwards of 30 seconds, often more than a minute). This was in addition to infrequent, yet highly annoying filesystem hangs that would beachball my machine for 30 seconds or so. Their response: Well sorry, you need to upgrade to our new version, our old version is not supported on Snow Leopard. I mean I guess thats their prerogative, but when you software does only one thing, and not even that well, you would think they might cut paying customers a break. especially when their software costs more than the OS that it was incompatible with!
 
OptimusP83 said:
Their response: Well sorry, you need to upgrade to our new version, our old version is not supported on Snow Leopard.
Click to expand...
That can't happen with Tuxera NTFS. Our license is a "forever license" which means that one can use the license key for all future Tuxera NTFS releases.

Please note, this may be a time-limited possibility. In the future we may have to introduce a "pay per product" licensing fee as all other companies do which of course won't be valid for the people who have "forever license". At the moment we are happy to offer the "forever license" to everybody and have no current plans to change this.

Regards,

Szabolcs Szakacsits
Chief Software Architect
Tuxera Inc.
http://tuxera.com
 
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