Is there a linux that supports NTFS?

S

swoop56

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 14, 2002
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I want upgrade the OS on my file server. I wanted to do this awhile ago but it's been working great so why bother. But now I'm just in the mood to. Is ther a linux distro that supports ntfs since all of my backup drives are all full and I have nowhere to put the data.
 
Any Linux system can read NTFS. Write support is "experimental and dangerous" though. With some distributions (Fedora Core 3... grrr) you have to recompile the kernel to get NTFS support, but it's there.
 
Also implementation of support for dynamic drives (especially spanned volumes) is basically nonexistant. Linux + NTFS >> workable sometimes, but avoid if possible.
 
i've used the captive ntfs driver without problems, but it was just a limited thing...
 
I've also used captive-NTFS for writing and it worked very well. Comes included in Knoppix and its many variants.
 
Arkaine23 said:
I've also used captive-NTFS for writing and it worked very well. Comes included in Knoppix and its many variants.
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Yeah it tends to work, but it *is* still experimental and can be risky.
 
As risky as using windows to write to NTFS, since that's precisely what it does- hijacks a windows kernel and ntfs driver from windows and uses them to do the writing.

Now the NTFS write ddriver built into the Linux kernel on the other hand... THAT is experimental and risky.
 
Arkaine23 said:
As risky as using windows to write to NTFS, since that's precisely what it does- hijacks a windows kernel and ntfs driver from windows and uses them to do the writing.

Now the NTFS write ddriver built into the Linux kernel on the other hand... THAT is experimental and risky.
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I know how it works, having used it ;) I still don't trust it much exacty *because* it's a Kludge writ large; using a Windows IFS module from Linux. To each his own :)

Then again, I never had a need to write to NTFS from *nix, so I guess it doesn't matter to me other than as an esoteric piece of tech.
 
Actually in the kernel im using 2.6.9 NTFS write support is no longer experimental however it is a crippled implementation. If you are OVER writing a file on a NTFS partition this consider safe/stable. Its when you attempt to create a new file where things get hairy. In fact I think they disabled that feature altogether. But seeing as how the general consensus in the linux community is to stay away from writing to ntfs altogether, I would heed their advice
 
Flagg said:
Actually in the kernel im using 2.6.9 NTFS write support is no longer experimental however it is a crippled implementation. If you are OVER writing a file on a NTFS partition this consider safe/stable. Its when you attempt to create a new file where things get hairy. In fact I think they disabled that feature altogether. But seeing as how the general consensus in the linux community is to stay away from writing to ntfs altogether, I would heed their advice
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Yep. I'm still trying to figure out the 'why' part of it. It's not worth messing with IMNSHO.
 
Agreed. With proven files systems like FAT32 in Win/Dos arena and ReiserFS/EXT3 in the linux arena NTFS's benefits really become a moot point.
 
Flagg said:
Agreed. With proven files systems like FAT32 in Win/Dos arena and ReiserFS/EXT3 in the linux arena NTFS's benefits really become a moot point.
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Not if you're running Windows; NTFS is far superior to FAT32 both from a failure recovery and a performance/storage efficiency standpoint, especially with large drives. My 'why' question is 'why would you ever want to write to NTFS from Linux' :)
 
You can read and write to Ext2 in windows fine so i don't see any need to dick around with NTFS in linux either.
 
ThomasE66 said:
Not if you're running Windows; NTFS is far superior to FAT32 both from a failure recovery and a performance/storage efficiency standpoint, especially with large drives. My 'why' question is 'why would you ever want to write to NTFS from Linux' :)
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Absolutely. I should have elaborated a little more. You are correct. NTFS is far superior to FAT32 in both security and performance. I was referring to a SOHO environment If you really want to run windows and have the ability to write to the drive via linux FAT32 is a perfectly acceptable solution. Again this is in a SOHO environment and not a major operation.
 
Whatsisname said:
You can read and write to Ext2 in windows fine so i don't see any need to dick around with NTFS in linux either.
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True. But ext2 is an antiquated file system and is being fazed out in favor for a journaled filesystem like ext3 or reisferfs.
 
Flagg said:
True. But ext2 is an antiquated file system and is being fazed out in favor for a journaled filesystem like ext3 or reisferfs.
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ext3 = ext2 with journal turned on (-j option for mkfs.ext2) so you can still read and write ext3 with ext2 support, just won't update the journal (which isn't a good thing)
 
Also, has anyone got any data on the speed of captive-NTFS?
I've only tried it once, and it was abysmally slow, but that might very well have been for completely different reasons.
 
My attempts at benchmarking captive were foiled by the fact that it will fail to write to files larger than 200mb or so on my machine. Since the machine has 512 mb of memory, that means that the writes basically get cached in memory, so I was getting times like a third of a second for 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/ntfs/test.file bs=8k count=12k'. That's about 300 MB/s, so I don't think it's particularly accurate. Ymmv.
 
In FreeBSD you can do systat -iostat 1 to get a second-to-second overview of disk I/O in transactions/s, mb/s and kb/transaction. I'm sure there's a similar tool for linux out there, and if someone knows of one it could tell you how fast the data actually gets to the disks.
 
I used to just use Bonnie for my Linux filesystem benchmarking. I suppose it could be used with an NTFS volume.
 
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