So, not being able to delve into my Mac, and change code etc, I have two choices so that ElC can read my offboard hard drives.
Paragon or Tuxera?
Who here has bought one or even both ?
Thoughts greatly received.
Thanks
T
MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4)
unless you need to use the drive for windows or connected directly to a windows computer you don't need NFTS and you would benefit from copying the existing data to a mac formatted drive then format that drive the same [Mac Extended (Journaled)]
Otherwise if you need to keep it NTFS for that reason depending on the drive there may be compatible drivers available for free to allow you to Read/Write/Delete using NTFS on the mac from the developers website for that drive and most importantly OS 10.11
if not both claim to be compatible and both have a long track record so either one, if you HAVE to have NTFS, but like I said, there is no benefit to an NTFS drive in a Mac environment and your software could become a problem if an update or compatibility causes it to fail later on.
The only compatible free software upload as far as I know is the Seagate one. And works on their drives only.
My hard drives are a mix of all-sorts, so it won't work, and I'm not messing about re-formatting dozens of drives, having first copy / pasted all 1-2TB of info from said drives first, the back again(though I have done for one and I appreciate it's one method) as I'd be all week and get no work done!
That free software from Seagate is a special version of Paragon's NTFS for Mac. It only works with Seagate drives. It will ignore any other brand of drive formatted as NTFS.
With this in mind, is the Paragon brand considered more or less the most reputable of the two?
I have no experience of either.
I must have some software installed - don't recall ever doing that - to read all my other drives.
Thoughts?
T
if you bought or formatted an NTFS drive it either came with software or you downloaded something
there is NOTHING out of the box in any version of OS X that allowed you to write to an NTFS
that being said I've used paragon with a seagate drive that shipped NTFS but reformatted the drive quickly after. It never worked on any other Seagate NTFS drive after so unless you buy something that is a all drive NTFS solution with Mac OS it may not work if it was a proprietary bundle.
Secondly check the forums for those products and see what people said.
The "Days" it takes to backup that drive and reformat it might be worth it if an update breaks something and you have a 2TB read only monolith on your desk. Also you can no backup to or from an NTFS drive with TimeMachine.
In a sense if you need the drive NTFS and you need to write to it; connect to a windows PC and enable file sharing and use it from the mac with no restrictions, no need to research updates and no other software to buy or pay for updates later on as it will be native to the windows box its connected to and the mac won't care what format it's in.
I've never heard bad about either, so it really just comes down to cost. That is, why spend $31 for the Tuxera software when Paragon's is only $20?
Or, save yourself the money entirely and reformat the drive on a Windows computer as exFAT. Fully read/write capable on both platforms with no need for any extra software on either side. exFAT can handle huge files, so there's essentially no file size restriction.
Disk Utility can format a drive as exFAT, but there is a known issue where it will sometimes use too large of a block size (you can't control it in OS X), and then Windows can't read the drive. In Windows, don't choose a block size larger than 1024.
OK.
Cheers.
No Windows machine here but I could borrow.
Reformatting dozens of drives either the Mac drive format of the exFAT is not something I wish to embark upon, so may stump-up the £20.
T
I have downloaded Paragon's version 14 for ElC..
So far, so good, the main focus being but one thing: to be able to read and write to offboard hard drives already formatted for Windows.
Thus far, all is working well.
A bit of a faff to get the authentication code and my login details to accept, but Restart x3 seems to have sorted that one out.
Thanks for everyones' help.
T
Well. You guys can take a look on the Paragon and Texura NTFS comparison table here.
Many users complain Paragon NTFS does not work well on big NTFS filesystems and big amount of files.
Texura 2015 seems to be better except the freaking high price for a single license. On another side, Paragon offers discount on multiple license purchase and frequently promo codes.
I sometimes access to NTFS USB from friends, so Paragon NTFS is a better choice since it meets all my general using.
Tuxera NTFS 2015? is actually developed from NTFS-3G, an open-source, which is contributed by hundreds of Linux distributions. It is still associated with very common "Tuxera NTFS could not mount" error absolutely similar to the nightmare "NTFS-3G could not mount" problem. It should not be called a professional NTFS software, while it costs $31 like steal.
Paragon NTFS 14 is developed by Paragon, a very well-known company creating powerful softwares in Hard Drivers Integration field. It supports all NTFS versions and works stably. The cost before discount for a single license is $19. I am not sure the promotion is not expired yet, but Paragon offers 25% OFF discount page here.
Allowing NTFS HDrives to be read. Paragon "v" Tuxera. Any experiences?
