Taking into account that you probably have a lot of friends with NTFS volumes, who can visit you and bring you something interesting there, you actually have no choice except as try to make NTFS working.īut first, in case you want to make your own research, or you are looking for a solution that just works out of the box, and you are ready to pay for it, you can give a try to Paragon NTFS for Max OS X 9.0 for $19.99 (5-days trial). The only issue is write mode in Mac OS X. But has not write support under Mac OS X.Īs you can see, in terms of cross-compativility, NTFS is the best choice: it works almost everywhere, and with no limitations. Has native read-only support in Mac OS X. Okay with big files an bug volumes. Works natively in all Windows systems. More on that, it has only one file table, so if this only place will be corrupted on write, I will get all the data lost. Older Windows systems (Vista, XP) require Service Packs and updates to support exFAT.

* FAT64 (exFAT) is a new solution, but it works natively only in Mac OS X and Windows 7. * FAT32 work in each and every OS now, but has limitation for file size up to 4GB (so, you cannot store DVD image, which is usually 4.5+ GB). Windows need third-party software, which is either free file browser/extractor or paid low-level drivers. * HFS+/HFSX (or “Mac OS Extended”/”Mac OS Extended (case sensitive)”) - okay with big volumes and big files, but works natively under Mac OS X and Linuxes only. There are few possible choices for large (~1TB) file storages, but each has very unpleasant limitations and issues: Even if these are your own drives and you can select a filesystem to use, that choice is not easy. The only reason to worry about this problem is an ability to access external storage drives. And later I will show how you can get the most universal way - NTFS - to work where it does not work by default, with links and pictures. So I will shortly describe the usual choices for external data storages, and what problems arises with each of them. The key here is a proper combination of software versions. And the much worse problem is that “old” solutions do not work well.īut after one or two weeks of researching of this issue, I’ve managed to make NTFS work in Mac OS X Lion (10.7). And many users had started to complain that their NTFS disks stopped working.

Mac OS X Lion (10.7) was released recently, in the end of July 2011. UPD (IMPORTANT): Native driver makes NTFS unusable. UPD : There is even better way to solve the same issue with native Mac OS X drivers, but it has its own pros and cons.

5 UPD: Using native drivers from previous Mac OS X versions to speed up write operations.

Paragon driver for mac os mountain lion