What's Happening With NTFS On Linux?

A suspiciously shady Anonymous Coward asks: "Given that more and more people with MS operating systems are migrating to Linux, it seems curious that the NTFS kernel module has seen little development (still experimental, dangerous in RW mode). What projects are on the horizon to make Linux play nicer with NTFS volumes?" Will the changes that Microsoft has made to NTFS for Windows 2000 significantly delay any planned NTFS development?

Re:links

[matthead]

I once heard that NTFS was the ideal filesystem under Linux for removable media, because it was resistant to the manglings that plague FAT and ext2fs. Is that true?

Uh, no, not at all. First of all NTFS is anything but ideal for removable media, period. Have you ever seen NTFS on a floppy? There's a damn good reason NT doesn't let you format a floppy with NTFS. The I/O overhead needed for NTFS kills perfomance dead, nevermind the space you lose to filesystem overhead. NTFS is OK on fast things, like hard drives, but don't even think about using it on anything slower.

If anything, FAT is ideal for small removable media - floppies, that is. For ZIP disks, you might think about ext2fs, if you're not going to use it under any other OS. FAT's simple structure keeps overhead low, which is good for removable drives, which are slower.

-Matthead

Re:links

[criticalrealist]

You are 100% correct. (Technically, it was a Yahoo search, but, technically, Yahoo uses Google). Aren't those links a good starting point?

I don't really have much to say about this topic, except that I once heard that NTFS was the ideal filesystem under Linux for removable media, because it was resistant to the manglings that plague FAT and ext2fs. Is that true?

links

[criticalrealist]

http://www.informatik.hu-berlin .de /~loewis/ntfs/ [hu-berlin.de].

http://slashdot.org/articles /00 /09/25/2314215.shtml [slashdot.org]

Re:Let's hope it's big

[prog-guru]

If all you need is read support to "be at peace" you can do that now, you just need to enable NTFS support in your kernel. I don't think the stock RH7 kernel has NTFS support, if not you'll have to recompile. I can read my Win2k NTFS partition fine.

Let's hope it's big

[bonzoesc]

I sure would like to be able to write to the evil half of my machine from the good. I curse the day when I converted my big-ass 20G partition from FAT32 (readable by all) to NTFS-NT5. Once I can read my MP3s again, I will be at peace...

Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate

Re:Let's hope it's big

[bonzoesc]

I don't use 9x - NT5 is better for everything I do. I use NT5 and RedHat 7 (I know it's buggy, but that builds character).

Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate

Re:Let's hope it's big

[NNKK]

I have no idea what you people are up to
I screwed up my Win2k installation and had to use linux NTFS read support to back up the data I had before I reformatted
everything got transferred just fine
compile NTFS read support into your kernel and have fun with your MP3s
(or better yet, back up what you need, format the NTFS partition to FAT32, and reinstall... FAT32 is faster than NTFS in raw large data transfers anyway)

Re:Let's hope it's big

[wwphx]

Try Win2K Pro. It supports FAT32, I don't know if you could convert from NTFS to FAT32 but at least NT can coexist to a degree.

--

Re:Let's hope it's big

[trollanthropist]

www.sysinternals.com have a file-system-driver for win98 that essentially 'wraps' the necessary W2K system files.
They have full read-write support going (have to pay for the write version).

So, it's possible to support NTFS5.
Maybe whoever is in charge (if anyone) of developing support under Linux should aim for the wrapper approach - that should mean that responding to any future changes that MS make would be easier also.

[BeOS also _reads_ NTFS5 OK, and has done so for as long as I've been using it (since the end of March, this year).]