NTFS-3G supports all operations for writing files: files of any size can be created, modified, renamed, moved, or deleted on NTFS partitions. Transparent compression is supported, as well as system-level encryption. Support to modify access control lists and permissions is available. NTFS partitions are mounted using the Filesystem in Userspace interface. NTFS-3G supports hard links, symbolic links, and junctions. With the help of NTFS reparse point plugins, it can be made to read chunk-deduplicated files, system-compressed files, and OneDrive files. NTFS-3G provides complete support and translation of NTFS access control list to POSIX ACL permissions. A "usermap" utility is included to record the mapping from UIDs to Windows NT SIDs. NTFS-3G supports partial NTFS journaling, so if an unexpected computer failure leaves the file system in an inconsistent state, the volume can be repaired. As of 2009, a volume having an unclean journal file is recovered and mounted by default. The ‘norecover’ mount option can be used to disable this behavior.
Performance
Benchmarks show that the driver's performance via FUSE is comparable to that of other filesystems' drivers in-kernel, provided that the CPU is powerful enough. On embedded or old systems, the high processor usage can severely limit performance. Tuxera sells optimized versions of the driver that claims to have improved CPU utilization for embedded systems and MacOS. The slowness of NTFS-3G on embedded systems is attributed to the frequent context switching associated with FUSE calls. Some open-source methods provided to reduce this overhead include:
The underlying FUSE layer has an option called to use larger blocks when writing. Using a larger block means fewer context switches. This is in fact a solution recommended by Tuxera. A patch is available to use an even larger block.
Synology Inc. uses a modified NTFS-3G on their NAS systems. It replaces the ntfs-3g inode caching with a different mechanism with unsure benefit.
History
NTFS-3G forked from the Linux-NTFS project on October 31, 2006.
On February 21, 2007, Szabolcs Szakacsits announced "the release of the first open-source, freely available, stable read/write NTFS driver, NTFS-3G 1.0."
On October 5, 2009, NTFS-3G for Mac was brought under the auspices of Tuxera Ltd. and a proprietary version called Tuxera NTFS for Mac was made available.
On April 12, 2011, it was announced that Ntfsprogs project was merged with NTFS-3G.
