Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Writing to NTFS from Mac

One major problem which most of us face while switching between windows and any other operating system is the incompatibility of file systems. While I had read access to the NTFS drive from my Mac, I did not have write access. The problem became more prominent after I recently bought an external hard drive for porting data between my mac and my other windows computers.
One solution was to keep all my disks in FAT format which is the universal format for read/write for all OS. The only drawback being that it can not handle files greater than 4 GB. Someone suggested to me to use a software called MAC drive on my windows machine. This software allows windows machine to access HFS+ partitions seamlessly. It was a good alternative just that there are more windows machine than MACs so one needs to install them on every machine being used.
Today while browsing through heap of topics on Wikipedia, I came across an open source project called NTFS 3G which installs a user space driver on MAC for reading/writing to NTFS partitions. You can actually format a NTFS partition using this. Even the disk utility shows an integrated option of NTFS format after installing this.

http://www.ntfs-3g.org/



Not only MAC, it is available for other operating systems like Linux also. It actually rids one of lot of hassles. Do not forget to install MAC Fuse library package to make it functional.

2 comments:

GoodAm said...

These NTPS drivers for mac are buggy. I have lost around 150 GB of backed up data because of this... it just simply disappeared from the hard drive... Also the writing speed turn out to be very slow.... apart from that its a great solution if you need to use your disk mainly with windows.....

kdeo said...

As of now the latest version seems to be working well with me...lets see how it fares in the long run.