星期五, 5月 17, 2013

installing Paragon NTFS & HFS driver

Recently, I bought a portable HD, which came NTFS-formatted. At first I considered formatting it to XFS or ext4 but it occurred to me that I might have to mount it with windows from time to time (although I don't have many windows PCs and will not have more than one unless necessary.)

Rather than trying to fix/install anything on the stupid Windows to support xfs/ext4, I prefer messing up with my linux which, in some way, is more intuitive for me than dealing with those mysterious bugs in windows.

There's a ntfs driver called ntfs-3g. It is fine, but somehow too slow. I don't know why it has been staying on FUSE all these years, or if staying on FUSE is the reason that makes it so slow. There's a couple of commercial alternatives that come into play: Tuxera(which I suspect is the reason that ntfs-3g being so slow) and Paragon but only the later one offers a free driver for linux, so I gave it a try and it works pretty well so far.

Here's how I do it: