Even if your are using a Mac, chances are that ones in a while you might need to be able to write to a NTFS formatted disk. Why? You might switch from Windows and have external, NTFS formatted drives you want to share with your Mac, you might need it for your work, you may want to share NTFS partitions on your machine, etc.

Why not use the lowest denominator FAT32? Well, it is an old standard which is supported by every OS out there, but it has its limitations. If you need to write large files, video comes to mind or backup archives, you are out of luck with files beyond 4GB. True, most people may not have files that large. And I’m not saying you cannot use FAT32 if you wish to do so. If I have to use a Windows file system I prefer NTFS, since it allows me to write large files to it, which once in a while I need to do.

On your Mac you can read NTFS drives, but you won’t be able to write to them. That’s where the NTFS-3G driver comes into play. It is an open source driver that comes in Linux and Mac flavors (NTFS-3G for Mac).

I installed the latest stable driver, which is now called standard build. It brings all the dependencies it needs with it, so it is very easy. I installed and used it under Leopard. After the installation it was suggested that I reboot, which I did. It might work without rebooting though. Now you will have two new admin panels in the System Preferences screen (under Other: NTFS-3G and MacFUSE). I never made any changes there. When you use the Disk Utility you will see that you now have an option to format a drive with NTFS. I tried it on an external drive and it worked perfectly fine. The drive could be used under Windows without problems.

If you don’t trust open source products you can also buy a product named Paragon NTFS for Mac® OS X at the Paragon website. I never tried it, so I cannot say if it is better or not.

There is one thing: if your drive was not unmounted the proper way (happens after a crash for example) you will see a complaint and the suggestion to use Windows to mount and unmount it before using it. This is of course somewhat of a pain, and maybe not even be possible. I usually opt to just go ahead and mount it anyways. I never had any issues or lost data because of it. Your experience may be different, so do what you think is the right thing to do at your own risk.

I never mounted a partition that contained the Windows C drive in read/write mode. Better be careful here.

All this worked under Leopard. At the moment I don’t have any NTFS drives sitting around so I cannot test how well this will work with Snow Leopard. If you have any experience, please add a comment.

Edit: I bought a NTFS formatted 1.5TB Seagate Extreme drive today (was much cheaper than the MAC counterpart). Before I re-formatted the drive I tested if I can write to it, and it worked like a charm.