Tuxera Inc. is a Finnish software company that develops and sells file systems software. Its most popular products are Tuxera NTFS and Tuxera exFAT, both available on a number of platforms including Linux, Android, QNX and macOS. Tuxera's customers include a number of consumer electronics manufacturers in mobile phones, tablets, TVs, set-top boxes, automotive infotainment and storage markets. Tuxera NTFS for Mac provides read/write connectivity to Windows-formatted hard drives for macOS. The company was founded in 2008 and is currently headquartered in Espoo, Finland. Tuxera's other offices are located in the US, South Korea, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and China.
History
The origin of the company dates back to the open-source NTFS development in the late 1990s. NTFS had been introduced in 1993 by Microsoft as the file system for Windows NT. At that time Anton Altaparmakov emerged as the lead developer and maintainer of the Linux NTFS kernel driver. Meanwhile, Szabolcs Szakacsits continued to lead a platform-independent project under the name NTFS-3G. In 2006, NTFS-3G became the first driver to gain full read and write support. Commercial activity started in 2007 and the company was founded next year. In 2009 the company signed agreements with Microsoft, which was followed by global expansion and establishing the collaboration with chipset vendors and software platform companies. In February 2011 Tuxera joined the Linux Foundation, which was an expected step as for many years Tuxera has contributed to the Linux kernel. In July 2019 Tuxera acquired Datalight, to strengthen its internal storage offering and expertise in flash memory and flash management software.
Tuxera exFAT technology is used for SDXC memory card support. Tuxera was the first independent vendor to receive legal access to exFAT and TexFAT specifications, source code and verification tools from Microsoft. Tuxera exFAT can be found in automotive infotainment systems, Android phones and tablets from ASUS, Fujitsu, Panasonic, Pantech and others.
Tuxera FAT software provides interoperability and support for storage types such as SD memory card, CF card, Memory Stick, SSD, HDD via USB, SATA, eSATA, MMC and others. It is used by chipset and hardware manufacturers, and software and system integrators for full compliance with Microsoft patent licenses and GPL.
NTFS-3G
NTFS-3G is the original free-software "community edition" driver used widely in Linux distributions, including Fedora, Ubuntu, and others. In April 12, 2011 it was announced that Ntfsprogs project was merged with NTFS-3G.
VelocityFS by Tuxera (formerly Tuxera Flash File System)
Tuxera also develops and commercializes its own proprietary Flash file system. Due to its fail-safe technology it can be found for instance in vehicles and cars, integrated with the event data recorder to make sure the data recorded from sensors is consistent even in case of a crash.
Tuxera FAT+
In 2017, Tuxera introduced FAT+, a file system implementation for Universal Flash Storage cards and removable storage that is compatible with FAT32 but without the file size limitation of 4 GiB. It is royalty free for UFS card host devices and a standard recommended by the Universal Flash Storage Association.
Consumer products
AllConnect
AllConnect is a mobile app that allows to stream music, photos and videos from Android devices to DLNA receivers. It was launched in November 12, 2013 under the name of Streambels.
Tuxera NTFS for Mac allows macOS computers to read and write NTFS partitions. By default, macOS provides only read access to NTFS partitions. The latest stable version of the driver is 2016, released in September 2016. With the introduction of System Integrity Protection by Apple in OS X El Capitan, usage of third-party software in Disk Utility is no longer possible. As a workaround, Tuxera NTFS for Mac ships together with Tuxera Disk Manager to facilitate the format and maintenance of NTFS volumes in macOS. Currently the software supports 13 languages: Arabic, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. The software supports 64-bit kernels, including OS X El Capitan. It supports NTFS extended attributes and works with virtualization and encryption solutions including Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion.
