NTFS-3G 2010.10.2

NTFS-3G Editor's Review

NTFS-3G is a FUSE compliant file system driver that enables write access to NTFS formatted partitions or devices.

I must say that I've been waiting this first stable version for quite a while. This is the first NTFS driver that provides write access to NTFS devices and it is considerate to be a safe one.

NTFS-3G (3rd Generation) is currently safe, but it has an issue. Besides the fact that the mounted NTFS drives won't support the native access rights that were implemented into this file system, and the compression support, the writing speed on this drives is quite slow.

The developer said that you can mount even USB devices that are formatted as NTFS, but in fact this driver makes your hard drive to work with the speed of a slow USB device. The developers of the NTFS-3G driver said that they will fix the performance issues.

The distribution image is quite sweet. If you don't have a FUSE-compliant system installed, then you can find one within this package. You need to install this package first before actually installing the NTFS-3G package.

The NTFS-3G installer did its job for me. I was ready to pull out my *NIX knowledge in order to manually mount the NTFS partition that I have on this test machine after the driver installation, but I rebooted first, even though the package didn't required this. After the reboot I found out that the NTFS partition was mounted as NTFS-3G. This was elegant and headache free. No RTFM (Read The Friendly Manual) required. If this won't work in your case, then you have to read the provided documentation.

Pluses: it enables the write access to NTFS drives, the distribution DMG image makes your life easier because it has all the dependencies, and the install packages automatically configure this driver in order to be ready to use.

Drawbacks / flaws: the writing speed is quite slow, it doesn't support the native NTFS access control lists, the compression capabilities, or the native support for file encryption at file system level.

In conclusion: since this is the first safe NTFS driver for the *NIX family of operating systems, I think that the write speed isn't such a great issue. The driver is under active development, and I think that in time the situation will improve.

version reviewed: 1.328