NTFS on your Mac two ways

BTW, Michael, I forgot to ask: do you know if VMWare Fusion has the same problem?

DN

Pity the Paragon people haven't bothered to respond. Their responses seem to have dried up

Anatoly,

Does Paragon NTFS for OS X interfere in any way with Parallels 3.0? I believe Parallels uses FUSE. Do the two systems conflict?

DN

I appreciate your comments, particularly Michael Rose's balanced support for FAT32 in Boot Camp. I just got a MacBook from MacMall with a 30GB Boot Camp partition preinstalled in NTFS format, which is not what I wanted, so I quick formatted it as FAT32 and reinstalled Windows from the OEM disk. It's working fine, with one oddity: the Windows Boot Camp partition no longer shows up when I hold down the Option button during booting (however, I can boot to either partition using Startup Disk Preferences or Boot Camp Control Panel). Any suggestions on how to fix this situation? (It's hardly a problem now, but I'm concerned that if this is something that could cause problems down the road, I'd rather fix it sooner rather than later, especially if the fix is to repartition or reformat Boot Camp.)

Dear Forum Visitors, My name is Anatoly. I am Product Manager for Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X. Please feel free to ask my any question regarding the product.

Best regards,
Anatoly.

Just a comment about just how slow ntfs-3g really is -- I coastered three DVDs in OS X before I realized the cause was the slow read speed on the NTFS volume from which the files were being copied from. It's good for having access to a Word file when you need it, but it's nowhere near ready for primetime.

real quick-- whats the difference between checking the "quick format" box in XP's computer management when reformatting an unallocated partition? (reference screenshots are on http://www.jakeludington.com/hadware_upgrades/20040909_diy_external_hard_drive.html near teh bottom) please reply fast as i am in the middle of this process (and only because of your help)!

wow. thanks so much--love this forum compared to others.. its actually responsive and the articles arent 3 years old! ill try the 2 way partition for now i think--i wont need the HFS+ for now--ill post more if i run into any problems.

thanks again so much!

Hi Monroe --

FAT32 is still the default format for nearly every USB drive sold today, and is a perfectly valid boot drive format for every version of Windows prior to Vista. Its performance and reliability is perfectly adequate, with the caveat that your maximum file size on a FAT32 volume is 2 GB (making it inappropriate for video editing use). On the Mac, you can format a FAT32 volume of any size, or make multiple partitions -- HFS+ for Mac data, FAT32 for interchange, NTFS (formatted on Windows side) if you feel you need it -- and go from there.

If you format the drive as NTFS you will be using some software, whether Paragon's or ntfs-3g, on the Mac side to enable writeability. If you format it HFS+, you could do the same with Macdrive to allow the PC to read and write it. Either way you'll be sacrificing some degree of speed and stability to permit the cross-platform use of those disk formats. The least intrusive, easiest to support approach for disk sharing between OS X and Win XP/Vista -- the only mutually writeable, natively accessible format -- is FAT32.

I've got nothing against NTFS, I manage a lot of Boot Camp'ed machines that use it for their XP volumes. FAT is easier.

crap sorry about the repeat above-- i confirmed the wrong email.

thanks Michael--but one more thing. isnt FAT32 infamously slower and
more likely to cause problems? and if you do still trust it that
well, do you suggest i partition a 32 GB section for FAT32 (windows
only allows 32 GB correct? or any size i need on the mac) and leave
the rest NTFS so i still have the majority of the speed and
reliability there?