NTFS on Snow Leopard?

Sure. Start by downloading SLNTFS.pkg.zip at VersionTracker or MacUpdate. It will activate the feature.

Be warned. Write support is deactivated in Snow Leopard by default for a reason. * It is still highly unstable*.
You are better off using NTFS-3g.

Hi XxKaTaYoXIII;

IMHO NTFS should only be used if you are forced to use because there is no other solution available to solve the problem. Since NTFS is a proprietary file system of Microsoft for which full specs have never been released, all solutions to write to NTFS have been created by reverse engineering and leave a lot to be desired.

Allan

I use Paragon NTFS (costs money but you get support) because I need to access Vista and Windows 7 machines all the time. The product works extremely well and I have not had any problems on the Mac or the Windows machines.

I agree with Allan 100%, & for the same reason: no matter how good the support, unless you are running Windows, the NTFS write capability is provided by reverse engineering a proprietary file system & that is by definition a hack. No matter how carefully or skillfully it is done, or by whom, there is no guarantee that some unforeseen circumstance or seemingly trivial change to Windows won't result in data loss.

For all its shortcomings, FAT is a much safer "universal" file system for data that you must have write access for from Windows & other OS's, including OS X. Read-only access to NTSF files systems is inherently safe, & sometimes that is all you need, or can use as a work-around to make copies. Sure, that can be a pain, but compared to the pain of losing a lot of data, it is nothing.

As others mentioned here are your NTFS solutions:

http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/
http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/

PCs can read Mac formatted hard drives with:

MacDrive

You can also network PCs and Macs without any formatting needed:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1627

As others mentioned Snow Leopard can read from NTFS, but can't write to it without the above aides. You can't setup an NTFS volume as a boot volume on a Mac, or FAT32 for that matter. So consider your hard drive usage and decide the best solution to meet your needs.

XxKaTaYoXIII wrote:
So would it be safe just to format all my windows external drives to FAT32 so I can read and write on both Mac OS and Windows?

yes. but FAT32 has that silly limitation in that you cannot copy files larger than 4 GB to them. i'd rather format the drives for Mac (HFS+) and install MacDrive on the winsloth machine(s).

J GG

Hi XxKaTaYoXIII;

I think you would be ahead of the game if you forget about FAT completely.

Allan

Has anyone else noticed that enabling SL's built-in NTFS write support causes the OS to become rather crashy? I've experienced a lot of beach balling and system freezes, particularly when using spotlight. NTFS-3g really does seem a lot more stable.