Linux to get reliable NTFS read/write support

Thanks to danwarne for submitting this to the newsdesk

Linux users have long had the ability to read NTFS partitions inside Linux using Linux-NTFS and while it has technically been possible to write to NTFS partitions, this feature came with a big scary warning in the kernel. An alternative solution has existed, Captive NTFS, that requires users to use the original NTFS.SYS file to read and write data from a NTFS volume. This solution has some legal issues and, since an original file from Microsoft is required, a working solution cannot be included "out of the box" with Linux distributions.

Members of the original Linux-NTFS team have now created a promising new solution for using NTFS formatted drives in Linux without the use of any Microsoft code, drivers or files. Finally, Linux users will have reliable ability to both read and write reliably to Microsoft 's NTFS filesystem, using this new driver that is currently in beta. APC Magazine has tested stability and speed of the new driver, NTFS-3g, and found it works flawlessly but that the performance when writing data, in particular, was slow (10 minutes to write a 2GB file).

This is big news for desktop Linux users who dual boot between Windows and Linux. It also means that users of external hard drives will no longer have to deal with the artificial 32GB size limit on FAT32 formatted drives.

News source: APC Magazine