OSX & MacFuse/NTFS-3g rage

I thought Macs (The computers, not me) were supposed to just work? They bloody don't I tell thee.

If you've read my previous blog on performance of NTFS drives on OSX well I've now got the answer. The speed problem was essentially down to the free software for getting write access to NTFS volumes. MacFUSE & NTFS-3g.

MacFUSE is a google bit of software - info can be found here.

The NTFS-3g bit is an extension that gives you write access to NTFS volumes - info on that can be found here.

Now, by reformatting the system as HPFS and retrying the performance I could see that the drive itself, and the ports, were operating pretty well at 25Mbps+ - it was just as NTFS it was pants.

So thinks I, I'll simply remove MacFUSE & NTFS-3g and find a better solution! Oh how wrong could I be.

Removing MacFUSE
Obviously, with it being a Mac, you just drop it into the trash don't you? Oh no, you have to dig out a shell script that's hidden inside a package. You run a command such as:

sudo /System/Library/Filesystems/fusefs.fs/Support/uninstall-macfuse-core.sh

Nice and intuitive then. Not. Incidentally, I did finally find instructions here

Now, after doing this, MacFUSE seems to disappear. But hey, guess what, the volumes are still listed as NTFS-3g and I can still write to them, but with crap performance. I need to remove the NTFS-3g driver.

After a lot of digging I've found you have to delete references to NTFS-3g from /System/Library/Filesystems. Again not very straight forward.

After a reboot, my volumes are back to being unwritable NTFS volumes! But, they read now at around the same speed-ish as native HPFS. So where from here?

Well, after doing some more google-festing I found a product by Paragon - NTFS for OSX . I was very dubious having been bucked by the previous NFUSE malarky so I backed up and thought I'd give it a go.

.....and I'm proud to report that it works like a dream. 25Mb/s average read/write speeds from a USB external NTFS formatted drive. Ended up costing 33USD (which is about what, 12p?) - a complete bargain for NTFS writey-readey happiness.

All is well again in Mac's MacWorld.

All that is bar:

- Not picking up USB devices from sleep. RAGE.
- The odd 'popping' sound from the speakers. Not ragey, just mildly annoying when you've forgotten to turn the amp off.
- An odd one - the leading edge of the Macbook is quite sharp and hurts your wrists after a while.

.......and relax.