NTFS-3G

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. It is based on ntfsmount with full directory index operations, and offers "unlimited file creation and deletion".

NTFS-3G was introduced by Szabolcs Szakacsits in July of 2006. The first stable version was released on 2007-02-21 as version 1.0.


Limitations

Unlike the NTFS driver included in the Linux kernel, NTFS-3G supports most operations for writing files: files of any size can be created, modified, renamed, moved, or deleted on NTFS partitions, except compressed and encrypted files. Experimental support to modify access control lists and permissions is available. NTFS partitions are mounted using the Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) user space file system framework.

Performance

Recent benchmarks show that the driver's and other filesystems' performance are very comparable:

* Comparing JFS, XFS, NTFS-3G and ZFS-FUSE performance
* Benchmarks of 10 filesystems

That said, NTFS-3G is not yet optimized for performance. The focus of the development is still reliability and implementing the missing POSIX functionalities.

History

* Since 2006-10-31, NTFS-3G is a project on its own, no longer part of the Linux-NTFS project.
* On 2007-02-21, Szabolcs Szakacsits announced "the release of the first open source, freely available, stable read/write NTFS driver, NTFS-3G 1.0".