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Maybe NTFS is garbage. But there are many (most) external drives formatted with the FAT32 filesystem which is IMO absolute garbage (e.g. you cannot write files bigger than 4 gigs)! So NTFS would be the much better option for cross-platform usage of external harddrives since Windows cannot handle other file systems than NTFS and FAT. So IMO NTFS support is a must-have for any future MAC OS!

So the burden of cross-platform compatibility is on Apple? You said it yourself "Windows cannot handle other file systems than NTFS and FAT," so why do they get off clean? Microsoft could whip up a driver no problem.

Any driver for NTFS that doesn't come from Microsoft is a hack. Even if Apple does it, and hence it will not be free from problems. Which is why I don't think they have let it out of the bag. I personally wouldn't want to play around with half-baked file system drivers, if you do, more power to you.


Here are some solutions other than NTFS 3G:
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/
HFS+ support in Windows

Here is the best one. Connect your NTFS drive to a Windows box (I am guessing you have one if you need NTFS), share out said drive, mount it on your Mac. Done, NTFS write and read.
 
Go with MacFuse and NTFS-3G if you haven't already, I installed it on two friend's laptops so their flash drives would cooperate with school's computers, no problems at all.
 
Maybe NTFS is garbage. But there are many (most) external drives formatted with the FAT32 filesystem which is IMO absolute garbage (e.g. you cannot write files bigger than 4 gigs)! So NTFS would be the much better option for cross-platform usage of external harddrives since Windows cannot handle other file systems than NTFS and FAT. So IMO NTFS support is a must-have for any future MAC OS!

As Calderone so aptly said, how the hell is it Apple's problem to provide NTFS read/write capability when MS holds all the keys to the NTFS kingdom?

If Apple did provide said driver and there were any incompatibility issues with it at all, there would be a lawsuit over lost files, corrupted data, etc.

Which is exactly why the best solution for OS X users who must access NTFS volumes directly is to use 3rd party open source plugins and drivers such as Fuse.
 
As far s I know they are Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

What about the hidden EFI partition that every new Mac has?

Is that a FAT formatted partition?

Note: you can mount it with 'mount -t msdos'.
 
I've installed it, did some testing and it seems fine

I had NTFS-3G since quite some time, but after upgrading to SL, the NTFS option dissapeared from the erase format options in disk utility.

Does anyone knows how to get it back?

thanks,
jp
 

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