Is using NTFS a bad or really bad idea

[Stephan Schreiber]

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+

Hey guys, I do tech support for the video production department at a college. I’m also trying to find a viable solution to run Final Cut on NTFS disks (no perfect solution yet btw).

But I really want to warn you about exFAT. Right now, it’s just a really bad idea. There are a few problems with exFAT, but here’s the basics.

1. Windows 7 and Snow Leopard treat exFAT pretty differently. I don’t know if it’s Apple or Microsoft who isn’t following specs, but the result is that when switching between mac and windows with an exFAT drive, very very often I end up with corrupt files or a corrupt filesystem.

2. exFAT is relatively new and there aren’t good tools to fix it. When a mac HFS+ drive starts acting weird, won’t mount, etc, you use Disk Warrior and it does magic. When a NTFS drive is acting weird you use SpinRite to fix it. When an exFAT drive stops working right, there’s really not much you can do about it.

In the future, who knows; I hear 10.7 lion will add better NTFS support and possibly better exFAT, but for the moment I’d avoid it.

[Stephan Schreiber]

Googling around has found this forum for me.

Basically people are saying that Final Cut editing needs to take place on a Mac (HFS+) drive. It seems to have something to do with how FC uses permissions for scratch disk files.

I also found another forum (sorry I’ve lost the link) where someone said he had no problem saving files to a windows drive using NTFS-3G, but FCP still wouldn’t work correctly. So that would also seem to support the story.

[Ben Edwards]

I took the plunge and have been using the Pagagon NTFS for over a month. I have not experienced any problems with permissions on scratch disks. Ime getting 45/50 ms/S Off them.

Not usre about people saying you need to use NFS+, there was one person on the thread and they did not say if they were using the crappy free NTFS drivers or the great Paragon ones.

Ben

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