Sunday, December 27, 2009

Tuxera NTFS for Mac 2009.12-RC

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

Download Tuxera NTFS for Mac 2009.12-RC

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.

Changelog:
  • Performance improvements: Tuxera NTFS for Mac now includes many of the improvements featured in Tuxera NTFS for Embedded systems, designed to further increase performance and reduce unnecessary driver workload, especially when working with many smaller files and traversing large directory hierarchies.
    For example, when crawling a test volume recursively, 2009.12-RC was nearly 40% faster than 2009.10.

  • Performance improvements: The caching layer has been improved with more efficient lookup, which means less CPU overhead, and measures have been taken to minimize the amount of excess data that is read when accessing files in a random fashion.

  • Feature: Tuxera NTFS for Mac now includes a new preference pane option "Disable recovery dialog for hibernated volumes", which makes the driver ignore NTFS volumes that contain a hibernated Windows session instead of showing a dialog asking the user whether it wants to purge the hibernated state or abort mounting.

  • Bugfix: Fix for some users of Snow Leopard who had problems with formatting NTFS volumes (Tuxera NTFS was not displayed as a formatting option at all times).

  • Fix: General usability improvements in the installer and preference pane.

  • Fix: Minor fixes to improve compatibility with the built-in NTFS driver.

  • Experimental: Tuxera NTFS now attempts to mount Windows LDM partitions by default. This will not work at all times, but one user did benefit from this change.

Because of large changes for the codebase, this release is labeled a Release Candidate, and we would appreciate some feedback from users.
Please post your experiences here among the blog comments, or on the Tuxera Support Forum.

12 comments:

virtualmono said...

Great work! After downloading and a short test, I immediately purchased a license yesterday. If I experience any issues, I will let you know, but so far everything works perfectly.

nitrofurano said...

if ntfs-3g is software libre, why Tuxera NTFS, which seems based on ntfs-3g, is trialware?

Erik said...

nitrofurano:

Why? Well, why not?
Just because we are using the free software license model for NTFS-3G, it doesn't rule out that other models can be used in different situations.

NTFS-3G benefits from this as well, as many improvements and fixes made in Tuxera NTFS gradually get merged back into NTFS-3G.

jonathanmorgan said...

I just installed the release candidate. One relatively small problem - when you close the installer, it reboots your machine, even though the text at the end of the installer says you should re-boot, but don't need to. There is also no warning pop-up or anything, like in most installers. I'd recommend adding a warning pop-up, and maybe changing the text to reflect that the installer will reboot your computer. I am wary when I install so I had closed everything anyway, but it could be bad if someone doesn't realize. So, I'd at least check to see if this is how the installer works on other computers, and if so, I'd probably update the installer before you move this to a full release.

I installed your product because I couldn't get Paragon to correctly mount a Seagate USB drive with NTFS - it would mount, but then would just show me the recycle bin folder, not the rest of the drive. Your software mounted the whole drive correctly, so I bought a license. Good work. =)

Thanks,

Jonathan Morgan

Erik said...

sahfnwoadi:

Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for the purchase. I'm glad to hear that you're satisfied with our product. We strive to be the best in the industry at what we're doing.

Regarding the final stages of the installer, I don't think you read the text completely. Pay attention to the line "In that case you can just close this window without restarting.".

I.e. if you press the "Restart" button, then the computer will restart, as commanded. If you just close the window, it won't restart.

This behaviour is standard and defined by Apple (we're using the standard Apple installer infrastructure), so it is not something that we have very much control over. I also wish this could be more clear, but it has been this way at least since Mac OS X 10.4.

Also, if you have open documents that haven't been saved, then the reboot will not proceed, so you don't have to worry about losing data because of the reboot.

Eris said...

So, where's the community edition for OS X?

Erik said...

Eris:

The latest version of NTFS-3G is here.

Anonymous said...

I only write to glad ur great work with this program. Its really usefull!
Is great google give u 20 % time to personal works i wish in my comany would do the same hehe. ty im using trial version but i get license soon. Regars, Jorge

Erik said...

Jorge:

I'm glad that you like the software, and we at Tuxera are looking forward to seeing you as our customer.

However, I do not work for Google, but for Tuxera Ltd. You're probably thinking about the main MacFUSE developer, Amit Singh, who is employed by Google.
Here's a link to his website:
http://www.kernelthread.com/

Anonymous said...

Any idea when NTFS-3G 2010.1.16 will be released for OSX, seems they finally fixed the bug that caused NTFS volumes to randomly become unmountable on Vista and up.

I have such a drive and it's been in such a state for quite a while now. I have to use my mac at work to transfer stuff to my work pc over the network, because my PC is running Vista and soon 7 and won't mount my USB drive.

Thanks again for all your work. NTFS-3G for OSX owns!!! Especially now that it doesn't have that bug anymore.

STABLE Version 2010.1.16 (January 16, 2010)

* Fix: Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 couldn’t access a volume, file or directory if it had a non-resident TXF_DATA attribute despite being allowed by the NTFS $AttrDef attribute specification file. Solution is also available from Microsoft, please see KB974729. Upgrade is recommended!

Erik said...

Anonymous, January 18, 2010 5:39 AM:

An update will be issued very soon (after some basic testing), both for Tuxera NTFS for Mac and NTFS-3G.

Anonymous said...

Well, I was able to fix my drive which I had mentionned in my previoust post with the on-request only hotfix for Vista x64.
Installed the hotfix, rebooted the computer with the USB NTFS that had the TXF_DATA attribute non-resident still connected. The boot time checker detected and fixed the problem and was able to finally mount the volume.

Now I'm going to wait until the fixed NTFS-3G version gets released before plugging my USB NTFS volume back into my mac to avoid breaking it again.

Thanks,