Is using NTFS a bad or really bad idea

[Andrew Rendell]

It’ll work but it’ll slow down your system, so it’s certainly a bad idea. Whether it’s a REALLY bad idea is down to whether you’re the kind of person who’ll smash his own brains out against the wall when you get frustrated…
🙂

[Paul Jay]

For backup/writing/reading: No problem.
For editing: No go.

[Alan Lacey]

Ben, I’ve been using the freebie version of 3G-NTFS for sometime now. It works but is very slow. I’ve wondered whether buying the full version would speed up file tranfers. What’s your opinion?

Thanks Alan

FlashXDR,XDcamHD,XDcamEX,D9 etc
FCS,AE,Combustion,LiquidSilver,Vegas,Edius,
G5,MBP,Vista64,XP

[Michael Gissing]

There is nothing inherently slow in NTFS. Both Apple and Microsoft are just bastards for making their OS’s so clumsy with the others formating. Having used MacDrive on Windows and also having Ubuntu Linux on the office machine, I can read and write to all sorts of formats and NTFS is perfectly acceptable for video editing. There is more difference in connection type than formatting.

If an NTFS drive is running slow on the Mac, then there must be a level of inefficiency in either Mac OS or the 3G-NTFS software.

[Walter Soyka]

[Michael Gissing] “If an NTFS drive is running slow on the Mac, then there must be a level of inefficiency in either Mac OS or the 3G-NTFS software.”

3G-NTFS is slower than its commercial cousin, Tuxera.

Tuxera does have a 15-day demo version. Ben, you might want to try it and see how it performs. It would certainly be interesting to see the difference in speeds as reported by the AJA or BMD disk speed tools under 3G-NTFS and Tuxera.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Alan Lacey]

Yes that’s exactly what I was asking Walter. Being a PC man I know there’s nothing wrong with NTFS

Alan

FlashXDR,XDcamHD,XDcamEX,D9 etc
FCS,AE,Combustion,LiquidSilver,Vegas,Edius,
G5,MBP,Vista64,XP

[Ben Edwards]

“For backup/writing/reading: No problem.
For editing: No go.”

Can you please expand on this. Is is a speed issue or is there something else.

One thing I have come across is if you let the Mac go to sleep when it wakes up it has problems with NTFS volumes but that can easily be sorted by not allowing Mac to sleep.

Ben

—
Ben Edwards – Freelance Filmmaker
https://www.funkytwig.com

[Ben Scott]

use XFAT

works on osx snow leopard and windows 7

supports over 4gb file limit of fat32 and we found copy speeds similar to hfs+

[Ben Edwards]

Do you mean xFat or exFat. Gogeling for xFat does not return mutch (apart from lots of exFat links).

—
Ben Edwards – Freelance Filmmaker
https://www.funkytwig.com

[Walter Soyka]

If you’re going to reformat anyway, why not reformat as HFS+ (so that you can expect everything in FCP to work) and install MacDrive from MediaFour on your PCs?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events