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2IS

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Jan 9, 2011
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Subject pretty much says it all. I make extensive use of NTFS formatted flash drives and it would be a nice plus if Lion can read AND write to it.
 
That's pretty weak... Is there a 3rd part app you recommend? Preferably one that's available from the app store if possible.
 
Here is what I used when I thought it would be an issue. http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/ To be honest it was never really an issue. If its an external just format it exFAT and both Windows 7 & OSX can read/write it. If its your Windows partition you shouldn't worry about it since you can still read from it to copy files over. Allowing OSX to write to the windows partition will create a crap ton of .DS_Store files and TemporaryItems folders. Same with Windows creating some files on OSX side if you enable it to do so as well. If your worried about keeping files in-sync between the OS's just use DropBox and if its larger than documents you should consider an exFAT external.
 
exFAT sounds like a good solution. My stick came preformatted in fat(16 or 32) don't remember and my problem was being able to write large files to it. (4GB max file size for fat32) and sometimes I have files that are larger. Looks like exfat does not have that same limitation.

Thanks for the suggestion.
 
I have been using Paragon NTFS for Mac since version 6 which was released in 2009 if I remember correctly. Now they are at version 9 and I have to say that I have not had one a issue with the software. Works great and it's nice to be able to write to native Windows file systems without having to worry about anything else.

You can opt not to take this route but just keep in mind that you might have times were you would have to write onto to someone else's drive to transfer a file which is more likely formatted in NTFS than FAT32/exFAT. I say go for Paragon NTFS but if you don't want to pay, then at least the free alternative of MacFuse which is a tad bit slower in terms of file transfers but still gets the job done.

Also, if you are running a Windows VM through Parallels or Fusion, you may have to have either Paragon or Macfuse installed anyway if you want to be able to drag and drop files to and from your Windows VM.
 
I was hoping for NTFS support but was going to drop the money on the paragon solution when I saw exfat support. All of my home machines are either Windows 7 or Mac OS so this works out well. Just reformat the drive exfat and everything is working splendidly.

Still wish there was NTFS write support, but care a lot less now.
 
I was hoping for NTFS support but was going to drop the money on the paragon solution when I saw exfat support. All of my home machines are either Windows 7 or Mac OS so this works out well. Just reformat the drive exfat and everything is working splendidly.

Still wish there was NTFS write support, but care a lot less now.
does exfat support files over 4 gigs like ntfs does?
 
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