Paragon NTFS 15

[roadkill401]

I made the move to Apple from Windows about 3 years ago. It was the dread of having to use Windows 8 that forced the move. But perhaps not being an Apple diehard, I still have a bootcamp loaded onto my iMac that has since gone from Win7 to the newer Win10.

The only problem that I had with bootcamp is that for my iMac it requires that I load it onto the internal SSD for it to work. Not having a really large SSD inside this lead to problems of space. So the only solution was to move to external drives on the iMac. (lets face it, Apple makes big bucks selling you larger internal drive upgrades). My solution was to get a Thunderbay 4 and fill it with my own SSD drives that are far cheeper and gives me the storage I need without too much of a sacrifice to speed.

The down side to this solution was that bootcamp doesn't seem to let your write to your external NTFS drive. Also Apple seems to like to automatically mount every drive that is connected to your Mac automatically. I can understand why they do that from an 'idiot proof' side, but some of us more power hungry users have external drives that are not used all the time but are needed on occasion. Or in my case, my external Windows on SSD and a large data drive (HD) for windows.

What I really like about Paragon NTFS 15 is that finally I have a method to flag what external drives are to be mounted and what i don't need. Now I can clean up my desktop side so that it just shows the drives that I need rather than a clutter. As an added bonus, I can also finally change the Windows 10 drive icon from the ugly yellow drive to something that visually looks nice and resembles a windows icon.

 

[HippyRabbitFish]

Appreciate the review. I have not pulled the trigger on Paragon NTFS yet, having just recently made the switch from Windows to Mac. I have some NTFS external drives that I'd rather not have to re-format after re-locating all the data on it. Call me lazy. But, interchangeable data between OS's where the source data can be modified regardless of OS is the state I need. Again, thanks for sharing!

 

[Audit13]

I'm using version 14 and I'm quote happy with it too. Thanks for sharing.

 

[Sappharad]

I'm replying to this thread because it showed up in the first page of search results when I googled Paragon NTFS 15.

I've been using the Paragon NTFS driver since version 9.0 in 2011. They had some kind of promotion where they were giving it away a "Special edition" of it for free. Prior to that I had been using the open source MacFUSE NTFS-3G driver. I decided to try it since it was supposedly faster. This was actually true, it was significantly faster than the free open source driver. After that point, I just kept buying the new versions whenever they came out.

I upgraded to 15 last week because it claimed to be faster, and promised compatibility with High Sierra. Anyway, at the moment I'm not very happy with version 15:
1. The preferences is now a separate application, it's no longer a preference pane integrated into System Preferences. This is not a big deal, it does look nicer, but it's an extra app icon for me to worry about.
2. After upgrading, it now takes my Mac about 5 minutes to shut down. I don't know what it's doing, but the disk activity light on my NTFS goes crazy during shut down. I submitted a ticket to their support 2 days ago, but they haven't even replied to let me know they're looking into it or request more information from me. This is the big reason I'm annoyed right now. I like to wait for my machine to shut down when I'm done using it (in case there's a problem during shut down) and this just means I have to sit and wait longer before I can leave.
3. For the first few days after the upgrade, my mac would also become extremely unresponsive for the first 5 minutes or so after boot up. Programs on the main SSD (HFS+, now AFPS after upgrading) would even be affected, for example trying to launch a program would freeze, Safari would randomly freeze, Mail, etc. This problem seems to have gone away after a few days and now things are behaving normally again.

Has anyone else run into these? I was running Sierra when I first upgraded, now on High Sierra but the problem persists. I haven't tried a clean install yet, waiting to hear back from their support.

 

[Audit13]

I upgraded to High Sierra from Sierra on a late 2013 13" and have not noticed my Macbook taking longer to shut down. I'm running the latest version of NTFS for Mac 15.

 

[Sappharad]

I should probably follow up on my question above. I heard back from their support, and they had me go through the usual steps to try and troubleshoot.

Unmounting the drive, unplugging it, Rebooting, Disabling Paragon NTFS, Rebooting, Enabling Paragon NTFS and plugging the drive back in fixed the problem I was having. Reboots and shutdowns now occur normally for me again. It's been consistently working fine for the past week. Perhaps the problem was some kind of residue from doing a direct upgrade from version 14 to 15 without letting it process the drive fresh.