NTFS 3G

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Free software Portal

NTFS-3G is an open source, freely available NTFS driver for Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, BeOS and Haiku. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

The first stable version of NTFS-3G was released on February 21, 2007 as version 1.0.

Unlike the NTFS driver included in the Linux kernel, its support for writing files has very few limitations: files of any size can be created, modified, renamed, moved, or deleted on NTFS partitions, with the exception of compressed and encrypted files. NTFS-3G cannot yet modify Access control lists and permissions. NTFS partitions are mounted using the FUSE user space file system framework.

NTFS-3G was introduced by Szabolcs Szakacsits in July of 2006^[1].

It is based on ntfsmount with full directory index operations and offers "unlimited file creation and deletion". According to their benchmarks, this userspace driver is 10-50 times faster than the commercial and proprietary Paragon Software driver, [1] and under some (unspecified) conditions can be twice as fast as the kernel ext3 driver (which is a native Linux filesystem)^[2]. However, it should be noted that the default settings for the ext3 driver prefer reliability over performance, which may distort the results and makes direct comparisons of these numbers difficult.

[edit] History

As of October 31st, 2006, NTFS-3G has been a project on its own, no longer part of the Linux-NTFS project.
On February 21, 2007, Szabolcs Szakacsits announced "the release of the first open source, freely available, stable read/write NTFS driver, NTFS-3G 1.0"^[3].
On March 28, 2007, the latest stable version, 1.328, was released.