Wednesday, 8 December 2010

How to share drive between Windows and Mac

Lately, I've read a lot of blog posts and forum threads asking about how to write to NTFS partitions from Mac OS X, most people suggests NTFS-3G, which I dislike, because 1 I don't like using 3rd party plugins on Mac OS, 2 I found NTFS-3G lacking in performance.

I've been looking around the net to found a better alternative resolutions. Then I found the following solutions. (All apply to if you have Snow Leopard only)

  1. Should be the easiest solution, update your Snow Leopard to the latest (currently it's 10.6.5), this release, Apple included exFAT support, which the file format can be read/write in Windows, Mac and Linux, so format all your external HDDs to exFAT.
  2. Apparently, from the beginning of Snow Leopard, Apple included write to NTFS support, just need to enable it, here is how:
    1. Remove all 3rd party NTFS plugins
    2. Launch Terminal
    3. backup /etc/fstab by type:
    sudo mv /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.back
    (don't worry if you don't currently have this file)
    4. Use nano to modify /etc/fstab by typing:
    sudo nano /etc/fstab

    5. Type(volume_name is your drive name):
    LABEL=volume_name none ntfs rw

    6. Repeat step 5 for all of your drives
    7. Restart your computer
Voila Native write to NTFS support on Mac OS and it's way faster than NTFS-3G. Enjoy!!!

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