Max File Size / NTFS ???

Hey,

I recently got a macbook and have been trying to backup some of my media to a 2 TB Western Digital Caviar enclosed drive. During my first attempt I successfully copied about 400GB of media to a single folder after which Finder suddenly failed to load any files in the folder.

Upon further inspection I realized that the ~400GB was not accidentally deleted, but the drive size itself had been reduced (from ~1.83TB to ~1.43TB). Thinking it was a fluke I reformatted the drive back to NTFS but I have experienced the same problem once again after copying over around 500 GB of media.

I have considered dividing up the media across several directories but will this really solve my problem? I have searched the forums and have found no file size or directory size limit in NTFS that is below 2 TB, which I clearly did not reach. I should probably also mention that I've been using Snow Leopard's native NTFS R/W capability explained here.

What do you think? I don't believe it to be a hdd related problem just because the media played perfectly from the drive before I copied too much and all my data just 'disappeared'. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

Maybe that feature wasn't enabled because it was buggy

Personally, I have previously used the driver from Google code

macfuse - Project Hosting on Google Code

That worked wonders! I just disabled the native rw support, downloaded ntfs-3g and macfuse and my HDD found all those files that had apparently 'disappeared.'

Thanks so much!

I have considered dividing up the media across several directories but will this really solve my problem? I have searched the forums and have found no file size or directory size limit in NTFS that is below 2 TB, which I clearly did not reach. I should probably also mention that I've been using Snow Leopard's native NTFS R/W capability explained here.

Click to expand...

I know you've already resolved your problem by using NTFS 3G and MacFuse, but a word of caution... that too is buggy and does not always work right.

Also the procedure you referred to does not work correctly - especially for large files. Snow Leopard does have the ability to R/W to NTFS and as you found out is not turned on by default. You might want to try Paragon NTFS instead ($39.95 and also includes the ability to go both ways).

Or, you might want to use what I use = "ntfsMounter" a free utility which mounts NTFS drives natively in Snow Leopard. I use it all the time and have had no problems whatsoever.

Regards.