ntfs3g experience anyone?

kramer2718 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Mar 2006 Posts: 78

I'm a rather cautious user and don't usually use the ~, but I'd sure like some decent ntfs support.

I'm thinking about trying ntfs3g but don't want to f*$k up my file system.

I'm not so much worried about permissions problems and build difficulties but I'm worried about problems with file system corruption.

Has anyone had problems/successes with ntfs3g?
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infirit · Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2006 9:34 am Post subject:

I did not notice any speed increase over the ntfsprogs fuse module. It is (as claimed by the author) by far not as fast as ext2/3 and cpu usage is many times higher.

So I would recommend sticking with the standard ntfsprogs fuse module untill some real benchmarks have been done.
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Spruit_elf · n00b Joined: 30 Jul 2005 Posts: 33

JoKo · Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2006 11:02 am Post subject:

I would have tried it if a AMD64 release was made

...

Edit: Wow, it is AMD64-compatible by now... Let's test it

...

infirit · Posted: Sun Jul 30, 2006 11:06 am Post subject:

kramer2718 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Mar 2006 Posts: 78

I'm not super concerned with speed (yes, of course it's going to be slower), but ntfs3g claims that it has full fledged write support (with file creation and everything). Does the fuse ntfsprogs do that?

Edit: after further research, it looks like that ntfs3g is a basically a beta of fully functional fuse ntfs support. There have been no incidents reported as of yet, so after having backed up my partition, I'm going to give it a shot. I'll let you guys know how it works.
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feld · Guru Joined: 29 Aug 2004 Posts: 593 Location: USA

This was his nearly from-scratch rewrite, guys. It doesn't have much old code in it...

He's created millions of files on NTFS partitions with no corruptions. In fact, if there is going to be a problem, it actually tells you and refuses to do what you asked it to do.

I've never had that issue, but I have had great success with it doing lots of writing without any issues whatsoever.

The speed is actualy quite fine if you ask me. Doesn't seem to be overly slow, anyway.
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kramer2718 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 24 Mar 2006 Posts: 78

Well I've been using ntfs-3g now for a few days. It is ~amd64 but I don't really know why. It built just fine and has been working okay thus far. It's really convenient to have decent ntfs support, but it is a bit slow. I'm sure that the speed will improve with the next version.
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Enverex · Posted: Tue Aug 01, 2006 7:12 pm Post subject:

Odd, I copied lots of files to my NTFS partition with this and when I went to use it in Windows the files simply didn't seem to exist...

ianegg · Posted: Thu Aug 03, 2006 7:41 pm Post subject:

I've been using the first release (20070714) this on my ~amd64 system with no serious problems so far. It's worked on amd64 from the start, just the devs said they didn't have the hardware to test it. I haven't tried any of the newer releases.

I've created files, moved things around, overwritten things etc., and the only problems I have are complaints about permissions and I can't mount the ntfs partitions as a user (fuse issue? - Haven't really looked into it.)

a7thson · Posted: Thu Aug 03, 2006 9:03 pm Post subject:

I used this first release of ntfs3g (the one from the future) on an NTFS partition I could afford to lose, and created a 4GB raw disk image with dd (bs=1MB,count=4096) from /dev/urandom, and though it took quite a long time (and I admit sweating a bit right before I hit 'enter' :-)

), it did eventually complete the task and I was able to mount the image to a loopback device. It's no speed demon, but it was quite usable. I also extracted a vanilla kernel to the drive (not the loopback filesystem) and copied a couple of full-size ISO disk images to it without issue, and deleted a large-ish VCD (>600MB) via a single-pass of wipe (or was it shred?). I could watch a good-quality DivX rip without a problem in mplayer, so it meets my needs for a drive I mainly use for media storage.

These are by no means definitive tests, just anecdotal, but were sufficiently confidence-building for me to entrust my external hard drive's 180GB NTFS partition to this driver for awhile. Out of curiousity I may try a crypto filesystem on the 4G disk image just to see how the loopback performs. And will be hoping all this playing doesn't send my drive to an early grave.

This driver informed me that it wouldn't connect to an NTFS partition that had been improperly shutdown due to a WinXP system crash (imagine that happening). I had to boot into Windows and shut down normally to get it to mount at all. I actually thought that was a pretty nice feature more than a hindrance, some may disagree. One problem I did notice was that I was unable to unmount the /dev/fuse partition after a power outage took my external HDD offline for about an hour as I was surviving on laptop batteries. When power was restored, the filesystem was no longer recognized (which commonly happens) though the kernel redetected the drive without issue as it usually does. All attempts at mounting or unmounting failed and I was not too thrilled with the idea of killing the ntfs3g daemon without warning, so I opted for a reboot. Everything returned to normal and I was again able to bring the filesystem online - so fortunately I don't have to worry about what "might have been" but that still worries me somewhat.
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filterpunk · n00b Joined: 18 Jun 2006 Posts: 71 Location: Portland, OR

I haven't tried it on Gentoo (since I use XFS), but checked it out recently on Kubuntu. It handles writing and file deletion under NTFS better, but I still wouldn't recommend it for daily use - once I booted back into Windows, chkdsk had to be run and a few files that i'd created on my ext3 drive and moved onto my NTFS drive were suddenly deleted with little warning and no prompting. It's definitely more stable than previous attempts and i'm sure it'll develop nicely, but it definitely needs more work.
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Konstantin · n00b Joined: 13 Aug 2006 Posts: 1

I use ntfs3g-0.1_beta20070803 on x86 and have no problems with this driver, writing and file deletion works well.