Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X Public Beta Testing

Just d/l'ed it and will try it out.

In case you dont know, Paragon is very well respected in the computer forensics industry. They have been around for a long time.

Anatoly,

I have read thru the other forum where you are testing and have not noticed nor been able to duplicate any of the issues being reported there on my MBP.

For those interested in speed comparisons - Just completed a timed test to compare write speeds.
Moving a 4.36GB .iso file from my external HFS+ via FW800:
to MacIntosh HD: 3 min 00 sec
to Bootcamp XP: 3 min 31 sec

For me, that is very acceptable time for the convenience of inter-operability.

While in OS X - have also experimented with moving files to the trash from the XP partition, booting back and forth and then restoring the files back into XP without incident.

Folks, just as a side note, I have now purchased, D/L'd and installed Paragon's Ext2FS Everywhere product, which allows pretty much every vintage of Windows 9x and Windows XP/Vista to read/write the mainstream Linux file system ext2/3. I am pleased to report that it is working well. I haven't done any exhaustive testing yet, but I can read and write files, create and delete directories, get volume information and so on. A very good start. Nice job Paragon!

Wow, thanks! I was just trying to partition my internal drive with one Mac partition, one NTFS partition for windows and one Fat32 partition for shared files but I couldnt get it done. With this I dont need to! THANKS! This really is great, I'm looking forward to the release and maybe some partitioning tools for mac?

Anatoly,

Is your team also working on being able to write to HFS from within windows also or are you leaving that to MediaFour?

I have been transfering files between win 2000 notebook to intel imac to external hd without problems. I like it, thanks.--robtg

tobywuk said:

i am a recent switcher. i have never tried writing data to an NTFS formated drive before so i dont know what it would do with out your software. I just tried installing your software just now and the process was very easy. I just tried writing to my external USB NTFS formated drive and it worked flawlessly. I have never tried writing to it before but did just now and im guessing it is your software that i just installed that let me do it. If this is so... I Love it

Click to expand...

I was having problems with saving files in my external Hitachi 40GB HD but after installing the Paragorn NTFS for Mac OS Beta and doing it again it went flawlessly. Great stuff ...

Do we get a free copy of it like MediaFour did for MacDrive beta testers?

BTW, I plan to get an IOMEGA 320 external HD and use it for my back up using SuperDuper. I have installed Paragorn NTFS for Mac OS beta in my MacBook. My question is this - do I have to format the IOMEGA HD to NTFS format? If so how? or do I just have to plug and play? I haven't done any formatting before so forgive my ignorance. Many thanks for the help. Cheers ...

I haven't played around with the Paragon software yet but can't you just access a friend/work computer and format with NTFS on XP/Vista?

EDIT:
Haha, forget the resizePartition tool, it can only do FAT, not NTFS, my bad.

hagios1972 said:

BTW, I plan to get an IOMEGA 320 external HD and use it for my back up using SuperDuper. I have installed Paragorn NTFS for Mac OS beta in my MacBook. My question is this - do I have to format the IOMEGA HD to NTFS format? If so how? or do I just have to plug and play? I haven't done any formatting before so forgive my ignorance. Many thanks for the help. Cheers ...

Click to expand...

1) not the right place for this question
2) why would you want to purchase an iomega drive?
3) never-mind
4) no, you would not format your external drive to NTFS for use solely with your MacBook
5) Hereis a good thread to get a little background of the different formats - read mac57's post there
6) Here (outdated link removed) is another you may find useful.

Anatoly, just installed it on my iMac G5 2.1Ghz. Plugged in a USB 2.0 80GB External formatted NTFS. Works perfectly. Just like NTFS was part of OSX. Very impressed!!!

bobtomay said:

1) not the right place for this question
2) why would you want to purchase an iomega drive?
3) nevermind
4) no, you would not format your external drive to NTFS for use solely with your MacBook
5) Hereis a good thread to get a little background of the different formats - read mac57's post there
6) Here (outdated link removed) is another you may find useful.

Click to expand...

Gee ... I am quite a slow learner as you can see. Apologies for asking the wrong question in the thread. The only reason for Iomega drive is because I can get it for free using my fly buys rewards points. Cheers ...

not a problem - we all go thru learning
for free is a good price and i would take it for that amount also

Im not sure if its because of the new NTFS drivers but under Mac OS, when I go to Startup Disk it doesnt detect the Windows partition, only the Mac and Network Boot ones. I installed Boot Camp normally without doing anything strange and I had done it before (and then restored the drive to 100% mac) and then it did show, that was without the Paragon drivers.

Dear Forum Visitors,

We just uploaded Beta 2 version that is our first release candidate. Please uninstall the Beta 1 and then install Beta 2. We are looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Dear Ge64,
What additional partitioning utilities would you like to have (to check, format, defragment, wipe, pack, retrieve NTFS volume related info, …) ?

when I go to Startup Disk it doesnt detect the Windows partition

Click to expand...

We are fixing this problem now, thanks.


Dear bobtomay,
Unfortunately, we are not planning to write “HFS for Windows” in the nearest future. Most likely, we will port our best-sellers (Partition Manager and Drive Backup) to the Mac platform.

Dear tripz1196,
Yes, of course, the most active beta testers will be granted with this product for free. The rest will have 30% discount. Unfortunately I don’t know how MediaFour arranged its beta testing. Could you please give me a link?

Dear hagios1972,
I would make partitioning under Mac (created partitions you need) and then format some of them as partitions with HFS file system. The others, that you want to format as NTFS, I would connect to a Windows PC and format them there as partitions with NTFS file system.


Please note, to download the public beta 2, please fill out a short web form and download it - http://ntfs-mac.com/ . Moreover, please be informed that beta 1 and beta 2 are 30-days trial versions.

We are going to release the product in 1.5 -2 weeks.
Looking forward to hearing from you soon.
Thank you all!
Anatoly.

Thanks for the info. I just filled out the form and downloaded and uninstalled. Rebooting now to install the Beta 2. Will leave you feedback later today.

Anatoly said:

Dear Forum Visitors,

We just uploaded Beta 2 version that is our first release candidate. Please uninstall the Beta 1 and then install Beta 2. We are looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Dear Ge64,
What additional partitioning utilities would you like to have (to check, format, defragment, wipe, pack, retrieve NTFS volume related info, …) ?

Click to expand...

On a Windows pc, I usually made seperate partitions for the OS, Docs, Music etc. However on a Mac its hard to do this, especially if you want to have partitions with different file systems, e.g. NTFS, FAT32, HFS, Ext3... And I havent seen a program for Mac that can do it without booting the pc in target disk mode, on Windows the pc would restart and run the partitioning software before Windows starts.

So the most important thing for me would be to be able to manage all different file systems, format, resize, merge, create etc, and maybe check and fix errors on the volume, all without using Target Disk Mode (maybe with a bootloader, or a bootable CD). Making images of disks or volumes would be a nice extra.

Anatoly said:

Dear bobtomay,
Unfortunately, we are not planning to write “HFS for Windows” in the nearest future. Most likely, we will port our best-sellers (Partition Manager and Drive Backup) to the Mac platform.

Click to expand...

That's too bad. I now use HFSExplorer to read my Mac disk from Windows but it's quite slow and it would be cool to at least be able to mount the drive for easy access.


Ive been using the software for a while and transfered a lot of data, never had a problem (except the thing where it wont detect the bootcamp drive in Startup Disk). The speed is perfect, I think this is very useful to anyone who uses Windows on their Mac.

Edit: Ive succesfully installed Beta2 and no new problems so far, Im copying a 32.9GB file from a NAS server to my NTFS partition and it's taking about 5 hours (--edit: 4:57 hrs). I dont know if this is of any use because its copying from a network drive but its not slow at all imho

Have installed beta2 - did another timed test copying a file from my external HFS to the internal NTFS partition - speed improvement for 4.36GB file from 3 min 31 sec to 3 min 24 sec for beta 2.

Sorry, as of yet have found no bugs to report.

Hello,

I'm new to the forums. This program seems great and interesting. I just installed it, but I haven't found any issues with it yet. It seems to work great!

I have an external portable hard drive that I use for sharing files between my Mac and Windows PCs and between my Mac and Windows partitions.

I can read/write on my XP partition and to my external hard drive. I'll keep an eye out for bugs and update this thread.

Thanks for creating the program to Anatoly and team.