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.

NTFS-3G for Mac OS X 2009.11.14

What's new:

• All in the NTFS-3G release notes.


• The 'legacy' build is now definitely dropped.


• The user can now choose at install time whether or not caching should be enabled, with a brief explanation of the benefits and drawbacks of using the ublio caching layer.


• Bugfix: Firefox was unable to save files to an NTFS-3G mounted volume because of missing 'setchgtime' implementation.


• Bugfix: Mounting an NTFS volumes with a non-ASCII volume name led to an error message when mounting (though mounting did complete successfully).


• Bugfix: Formatting internal volumes didn't work because of Mac OS X shell script suid limitations.


• Snow Leopard fix: Uninstalling now works properly.


• Snow Leopard fix: Preference pane now has 64-bit code compiled into it, so that 64-bit Mac users won't have to restart the System Preferences application in order to use NTFS-3G's preference pane.


• Change: The log file has been moved from /var/log/ntfs-3g_util.log to /Library/Logs/ntfs-3g_util.log.


• Many smaller fixes that result from merging the Tuxera NTFS and NTFS-3G brances of several utilities.

The development of this new Mac version was funded by Tuxera Ltd.

Many of you have probably noticed that we have launched a commercially supported counterpart to NTFS-3G this fall, 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:

• NTFS-3G for Mac OS X 2009.11.14
• Source code

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 10.6.2/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)