Read AND Write NTFS Hard Drives Partitions on a Mac for Free - O'Reilly Digital Media Blog
Mac OS X does a good job of working with a wide variety of disk formats. It can, for example, read and write USB hard drives formatted using FAT32 which is also compatible with all versions of Microsoft Windows. Any FAT32 formatted hard drive is useable right out of the box by either Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X. The problem is that FAT32 is drives using have relatively slow disk access. And, the maximum file size is 4GB. The 4GB maximum file size becomes a problem if you want to, for example, copy a large file like a VMware or VirtualBox virtual machine hard disk file from a Mac to a PC running Windows. Transferring large video files from a Mac to a PC is another common problem. Microsoft's NTFS partition format is fast and does not have a 4GB maximum file size limit. However, while Mac OS X can read NTFS drive partitions, it cannot write to it. I've gotten around this issue by moving files over the network and other means. But, moving files using an external USB drive is a much simpler and faster means... If Mac OS X could writer to NTFS.
Fortunately, there is a simple and free solution for this issue called...
...which coupled with...
...lets your Mac write to an NTFS formatted hard drive as well as read it (OS X can read NTFS partitions natively).
You need to install MacFUSE before installing NTFS-3G. MacFUSE provides a base for add-on file handlers like NTFS-3G to extend OS X's ability to deal with additional file systems such as NTFS.
Unpacking NTFS-3G reveals both an installation file and an uninstallation utility. The uninstaller can be handy if you later decide that NTFS-3G is not working for you or unnecessary. There's no instruction to reboot the Mac after installing MacFUSE and NTFS-3G. But, the superstitious Windows user in me decided restart my Mac anyway.
I attached an expendable (in case NTFS-3G/MacFUSE was buggy) external NTFS formatted USB hard drive to my Mac and copied two large, but not gigantic, files: A 589.5MB Xubuntu ISO file and a 2.85GB VirtualBox virtual drive for an Xubuntu Guest OS. After the file copying finished, I detached the USB drive from the Mac and plugged it into a PC running Windows Vista. After copying the virtual drive file over to the PC, I fired up VirtualBox under Vista and brought up the transported Xubuntu Guest OS on the PC (VirtualBox required a bit of tweaking and fussing).
The entire installation and test process was painless. The file transport worked fine (write to NTFS partition from a Mac). And, I'm very happy that I can easily copy large files using an NTFS formatted USB drive that Microsoft Windows can work with.
The NTFS-3G December 22, 2008 blog entry notes a couple of known issues for filenames with international characters and the Startup Disk preference pane (neither affected me). So, be sure to read that blog entry before installing NTFS-3G.
