Mac OS X understand NTFS?

Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
If I was to have a 160 gig hard drive in a USB/FIreware enclodsure, and the Hard Drive was formatted Windows XP Pro with a NTFS format. Would Mac OS be able to read/write on the drive?



Thanks.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 12
    ebbyebby Posts: 3,110member
    Mac OS X can Read the drive, but not write to it.
  • Reply 2 of 12
    If you have a network and share the NTFS drive, the Mac can read and write to it through your network connection.



    I did it, and it worked fine.
  • Reply 3 of 12
    aquaticaquatic Posts: 5,602member
    I don't get that; how it can read and write over the network, but only read locally. They're add writing in Tiger right.
  • Reply 4 of 12
    rara Posts: 623member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Aquatic

    I don't get that; how it can read and write over the network, but only read locally. They're add writing in Tiger right.



    Because over a network you'd be sending the data to the PC and the PC would do the writing to the HD.
  • Reply 5 of 12
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Aquatic

    I don't get that; how it can read and write over the network, but only read locally. They're add writing in Tiger right.



    It is very unlikely that Tiger will have the ability to write to NTFS. Microsoft is constantly changing the internal details of how they write NTFS and so there would be no guarantee that anything Apple would write would not kill the next version (thus setting Apple up for a lot of lawsuits). Apple is using the open source NTFS reading software, and that project has experimental write support, but it is labeled "very experimental" and the consensus is that it will never be anything but experimental.
  • Reply 6 of 12
    Hi there!



    If you write to a harddisk using a network connection you will most likely use the smb or the nfs protocol, both are well documented.



    NTFS is neither a standard of any kind, nor is it documented. There is a good chance of reading it, but writing to it might probably render it unusable for Windows pcs, loosing all data on the partition.



    the problem is, that today's harddrive sizes are not anymore supported by fat32, thus, there is almost no way to create a read/write data partition over the whole drive that is usable by any os directly.



    You might think of extfs2, which also has windows drivers, but it has poor error correction.

    I never saw any extfs3 or reiserfs (my favorite fs) rw drivers for windows pcs.



    BTW: Which filesystem type does mac os use?



    I usually hook up all bigger harddisks to a linux box, so every pc, mac, or whatever can use it via smb filesharing.



    cu,

    David
  • Reply 7 of 12
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    MacOS X uses HFS+, a (nearly) Mac only format. There are drivers for Windows (commercial) and Linux (free) however, but it's pretty rare to find them in the wild.



    HFS+ isn't a bad format - journaling that can be turned on or off at will, multiple forks per file (since 1988! ), and a number of other goodies that are on the slate for 10.4.



    Oddly enough, HFS+ access is gaining some traction in the Wintel world due to the iPod.
  • Reply 8 of 12
    Sounds cool ;-)



    I think there is no need for another fs on the mac itself, I will then use the smb client to mount my data drives..



    Can the mac mount reiserfs right out of the box?

    If not, I think it won't be hard to compile drivers into the kernel, or am I wrong? What about other unix formats?



    Hope I am not bugging you guys, I just ordered a mac mini (will be my first mac), so I got a lot of questions..



    thx!



    David
  • Reply 9 of 12
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Incoming

    Sounds cool ;-)



    I think there is no need for another fs on the mac itself, I will then use the smb client to mount my data drives..



    Can the mac mount reiserfs right out of the box?




    Nope.



    Quote:

    If not, I think it won't be hard to compile drivers into the kernel, or am I wrong? What about other unix formats?



    Well, I have a shock for you... ready? Sitting down?



    You don't have to recompile the kernel to add new file formats.



    Still there?



    Yeah, I know it's a major shock, but file formats, device drivers, heck, even motherboard component drivers are all pluggable units, dynamically loaded or unloaded at will. Drop the bundle* into the right directory, and voila. Done. To uninstall, drag it out of that directory. Voila. Done.



    *A bundle is a directory that the Finder treats as a single unit. To the GUI user, it looks like one indivisible item. To the shell user, it's a standard Unix directory, and you can dive in and peek around. Inside you'll find executables, help files, XML files that describe the bundle and its capabilities to the system, etc, etc, etc. All the crap that normally needs to be installed in a dozen different places under Windows or Linux is all in there. Applications, frameworks (DLLs + documentation + headers), most system components... all handled that way.



    You're going to love it.
  • Reply 10 of 12
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Incoming

    Can the mac mount reiserfs right out of the box?



    There is currently no support for ReiserFS on MacOS X. The Virtual Stackable FileSystem level in MacOS X could well handle it, but no-one has done the work to port it (non-trivial). Since there is already a journaled filesystem native to MacOS X, and you can get ext2 support with a plugin, there is not much demand. If you need to access the data, you usually have a linux computer with the disk in it, and can just SMB/FTP/SCP it over.

    Quote:



    If not, I think it won't be hard to compile drivers into the kernel, or am I wrong? What about other unix formats?




    Like was mentioned, MacOS X has a really great kernel module system called KEXTs so you wouldn't compile the kernel to add this sort of thing. Add to that and the exact kernel that Apple uses may not be identical to the one in the open-source Darwin project (but it is definitely very close), and so you couldn't be sure that you would get the exact same thing. With the KEXT system this is just splitting hairs though, there really is no reason to rebuild the kernel.
  • Reply 11 of 12
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Karl Kuehn

    There is currently no support for ReiserFS on MacOS X. The Virtual Stackable FileSystem level in MacOS X could well handle it, but no-one has done the work to port it (non-trivial).



    I think it might be interesting to do that job.

    Do I need to buy extra software to develop for os-x?

    Is there documentation for that sort of thing?



    Sounds pretty cool with the dynamically installable drivers ;-)



    David
  • Reply 12 of 12
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    No, you get all the professional dev tools for free.



    Head over to http://developer.apple.com/ and sign up for a free developer account. You'll get access to all the documentation, tools, dev kits, etc, etc, etc.



    Did I mention free?
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