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NTFS-3G is a stable read/write NTFS driver, but it is unfortunately extremely slow compared to both NTFS on Windows, and any native Linux filesystem. Not only is the access itself very slow due to use of FUSE, NTFS-3G does not have near the capability of Windows' native NTFS driver at NTFS's fragmentation avoidance systems. (I suspect use of NTFS under NTFS-3G is the cause of so many complains about NTFS becoming fragmented, because that rarely if ever happens on Windows)

Is there any (possibly nonfree) NTFS driver for Linux that isn't extremely slow?

EDIT: Most of the loads that will be going on inside this filesystem will be VMWare, which is why reasonable performance is particularly important.

Billy ONeal
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5 Answers5

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looking at http://www.tuxera.com/products/ntfs-open-source/ and the stats at http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-commercial/performance/ i do not think that you can get better speed than with tuxeras stuff.

akira
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4

In my experience, OS X can extend to Linux, the Paragon NTFS driver is 2-3 times faster than NTFS3g/Tuxera. On OS X, the Paragon driver is as fast as native NTFS.

akira
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path
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1

I want to share my experience in hope of being helpful.

  1. In Linux, just use the standard ntfs-3g. There is really no better option available that will serve you with higher performance without causing grief.
  2. I use Debian and I switched to it after trying LinuxMint and ntfs3 driver from Paragon Software. The driver performed fantastic in terms of speed but caused severe filesystem lockups when really pushed. This led me to believe for months that my new SATA Array or some of the disks I had, were bad. Switch to ntfs3 and the realiability problems completely disappeared.

Since then, after discussing it with a few informed colleague, I decided that I'd use Debian (so that I don't have to worry about reliability issues and things just continue to work) and ntfs3g (for the dual boot server. Master drives are all NTFS and backup drives are all EXT4).

Short answer from me - No, nothing is as reliable as ntfs-3g while being faster than this. This should save some of us a lot of trouble.

Rohit Sharma
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I know this thread is ancient, but it was one of the first returned from a search on NTFS performance in Linux so I feel it should be updated. I've had significant performance increase when mounting NTFS formatted drives using lowntfs-3g. When mounting a drive used on Windows for gaming with Steam games already installed I saw increases from 30FPS to 120FPS in games like Resident Evil 4 Remake.

As always, be sure to have backups of anything important on those drives you mount.

EnduranceMan
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The only other ntfs driver I know of for linux is the kernel read only one, whether it's any faster at reading. Reading/writing ext2/3 volumes from windows with the appropriate IFS drivers is slow too.

As for ntfs on windows not causing fragmentation even just a fresh install of windows 7 on a 2TB ntfs volume has fragmented files. Windows fragments if it allows faster write speed, that is how it's designed.

ewanm89
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