Hi Steve, Margaret, and Others, There are a couple of commercial solutions that will support writing to, as well as reading from external hard drives that you share with Windows systems. Vendors are Paragon and Tuxera for the NTFS-3G support Steve mentioned. There was an open-source project called MacFUSE (FUSE standing for Filesystem in Userspace), meant to make it easy to access files across different operating systems. That project stopped being supported in 2010, so the older downloadable interfaces that Sarah described are broken in Lion. Tuxera supposedly took up some of the public development, too, after the original effort dissolved, but the free NTFS-3G still hasn't been updated for a while, although they have brought out their commercial product for Lion. So the two commercial packages I'm aware of are Paragon Software Group's NTFS for Mac OS X and Tuxera NTFS, with prices of $19.95 and $36.50. Both have trial downloads at Macupdate.
I'll point you to a blog article that gives a comparison of NTFS drivers for Mac OS X: <http://girlyngeek.blogspot.com/2011/08/comparison-of-ntfs-drivers-for-mac-os-x.html> and here is the shortened link if that wraps: <http://bit.ly/xMv9kp> It gets technical, and you have to read the summaries for the interpretation of the graphical data. Basically, it puts Tuxera slightly ahead, but ranks the two apps roughly equally (and estimates that the overall cost will be similar, so the selection depends on what you prioritize). The author chose Tuxera (based on reasons she gave at the end, which include not wanting to see the dot underscore file duplicates.) What's clear is that when you copy or delete folders full of files, NTFS-3G performance under both the schemes are much, much slower than the comparable operations on a drive formatted with Apple's native HFS+ format. I don't use these schemes to share with Windows file systems, so I have no personal experience. The only time I've ever used file sharing with Windows files is on dual-boot linux systems where a very small FAT partition was kept for Windows. (These were all machines sold as Windows laptops that were set up for linux use.) HTH. Some other list members may have more information. Cheers, Esther On Feb 2, 2012, at 10:14 AM, Steve Holmes wrote: > Look for ntfs3g; that is what we use with linux to access read and > write to NTFS file systems. I would think something like that should > work with the mac since the mac is basically a BSD unix machine under > the hood. I will also be interested in what you find here as I have a > drive formatted with both NTFS and ext3 partitions. I'm reasonably > sure the ext3 native linux partition is a non starter on the mac > <sigh>. > > On 2/2/12, Sarah Alawami <marri...@gmail.com> wrote: >> It is an ntfs drive. there are some free tools that used to work but they >> broke with lion and were to my knowledge never fixed. but look for macfuse >> and see if you can get it to work. I hear that's one of the free ones that >> broke majorly. >> On Feb 2, 2012, at 1:37 AM, Margaret Booth wrote: >> >>> I have an external hard drive that I use with my windows laptop and >>> when I plug it into my Mac it shows up.. That's not my problem. My >>> problem is that I can't create folders or paste any folders from my >>> Mac on to the external hard drive. What can I do about this? >>> >>> Margaret >>> >>> <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to mac-access@mac-access.net You can find an archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at either the list's own dedicated web archive: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> or at the public Mail Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/>. Subscribe to the list's RSS feed from: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-access@mac-access.net/maillist.xml> The Mac-Access mailing list is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free! Please remember to update your membership options periodically by visiting the list website at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/>
