Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Tuxera NTFS for Mac 2010.6-RC2

The latest release candidate of Tuxera NTFS for Mac, our high performance commercial NTFS driver is now out!

Download Tuxera NTFS for Mac 2010.6-RC2

System requirements: A Mac (Intel or PowerPC) running Mac OS X 10.4 - 10.6 (32-bit kernel).

You can purchase a license for Tuxera NTFS for Mac in the Online Shop.

Changes since 2010.6-RC:

  • Bugfix: Create time was incorrectly converted to and from NTFS timestamps. Now 100 nanosecond-resolution create times are implemented properly.
  • Bugfix: The meaning of the 'archive' flag was inverted compared to Mac OS X's expectations, which led to problems for Microsoft Excel 2008 and possibly other applications.
Changes since Tuxera NTFS for Mac 2010.1:
  • Extended attribute support (only for Mac OS X 10.5 and higher). Tuxera NTFS for Mac now supports storing Mac streams such as Finder information and resource forks as extended attributes, translating to Alternate Data Streams in Windows terminology. This means that NTFS drives will no longer be littered with '._' (AppleDouble) files. Services For Mac compatible attributes are used for the special attributes 'com.apple.FinderInfo' and 'com.apple.ResourceFork'.
  • Support for storing the Mac OS backup timestamp.
  • Fix: Tuxera NTFS for Mac could hijack non-NTFS volumes in extremely rare cases, leaving them unmountable until Tuxera NTFS for Mac was disabled.
  • Preference pane bugfix: The Tuxera NTFS for Mac preference pane will no longer leave zombie processes behind.
  • All the latest changes in NTFS-3G are also included. See the NTFS-3G Release History for more info.
All users are welcome to discuss any NTFS-3G or Tuxera NTFS-related issues on the Tuxera Support Forum.

NTFS-3G for Mac OS X 2010.5.22

What's new since NTFS-3G for Mac OS X 2010.1.16:
  • All in the NTFS-3G release notes.

  • Fix: NTFS-3G could hijack non-NTFS volumes in extremely rare cases, leaving them unmountable until NTFS-3G was disabled.

  • Preference pane bugfix: The NTFS-3G preference pane will no longer leave zombie processes behind.

The development of NTFS-3G for Mac OS X is funded by Tuxera Ltd.

Many of you have probably noticed that we now have a commercially supported counterpart to NTFS-3G, Tuxera NTFS for Mac.
Tuxera NTFS for Mac builds on the reliable NTFS-3G code base, but has several premium enhancements. The most important one is the new high performance caching layer which makes Tuxera NTFS at least twice as fast as cached NTFS-3G, but in many cases boosts performance even more (see: performance comparison).
The Tuxera NTFS for Mac caching layer also eliminates the need to choose between safety (in the event of a power outage or system crash) and performance, which is a choice you'll have to make in NTFS-3G.
Read more...

Download:System requirements:
  • Mac OS X 10.4/10.5/10.6 (10.6 requires that you do not use the 64-bit kernel), running on an Intel or PowerPC computer.
The package has been tested with Mac OS X 10.4.11/PowerPC/Intel, Mac OS X 10.5.8/PowerPC and Mac OS X 10.6.3/Intel/64-bit Intel.
NTFS-3G includes and depends on MacFUSE.

Information on how to install and use NTFS-3G for Mac OS X can be found in the User Guide.
If you are having problems with NTFS-3G, then please write a forum post explaining your problems in the Tuxera Forums (or post the question as a blog comment if you're just unsure of how things work).

Known issues:
  • After installing ntfs-3g, all NTFS drives will disappear from the "Startup Disk" preference pane. Disabling or uninstalling ntfs-3g brings them back. It seems that this issue can't be solved, but only worked around since the Startup Disk preference pane doesn't recognize file system drivers that are not provided by Apple.
    Possible workarounds:
    • Holding down the Option key during boot (or Alt for non-Apple keyboards).

    • Intel users only: Install the rEFIt boot manager for better control of the boot process.

    • Using the command line utility bless (see man bless for more information)