Multiple user accounts

[Cassady]

I'm using the Paragon NTFS drivers. At the time I needed it, the free ntfs-3g/fuse combo from Tuxera hadn't bee ported to Lion yet, so I went with Paragon. I'm very glad I did. Their drivers perform better than the free ones from Tuxera (can't comment on the commercial ones) and they just sent me a free upgrade license for Mountain Lion.

Ok. That genius bar job might have to wait for a little bit.

You may as well have written greek above. Will google all of that when I get back - since the ignorant in me seems to think you're suggesting a drive type might make the difference, and that can't be right, can it?? Google here I come (again).


Any suggestions about whether I need to do a disk cleanup or something similar - or is the OsX's in-house systems more than adequate?

[koffiejunkie]

...since the ignorant in me seems to think you're suggesting a drive type might make the difference, and that can't be right, can it??

Drive type, no. As long as the connector fits your Mac, the drive should work. The filesystem is just an organisational structure that the operating system uses to store files. Windows uses NTFS (NT File System, NT being the name of branch of windows that 2000, XP, Vista, 7 is based on, as opposed to the 95/98/Millenium strain), Mac uses HFS+, Linux uses one of a couple (ext3/4 usually). FAT16/32 is what Windows 95/98/Mil used and a lot of systems before that, and is the most widely supported. It's stupidly simple, and Windows, Mac and Linux can all read and write to it.

NTFS is a different kettle of fish. It's a complex beast, it's patent encumbered, and unless they're making filesystem tools, most 3rd parties don't bother licensing it. The read-only part of it has been thoroughly reverse-engineered, and is supported by OSX and Linux, but the read/write part isn't. The NTFS-3G attempted this with some success, and two companies came out of it - Tuxera and Paragon. Both provide commercial NTFS drivers for OSX.

Any suggestions about whether I need to do a disk cleanup or something similar - or is the OSX's in-house systems more than adequate?

Nope, leave it to the OS. NTFS, like FAT32 stores files sequentially (maybe newer revisions of NTFS doesn't - not sure), so adding/deleting things always causes fragmentation. Unix-like operating systems (OSX is one) has always spread out files across the length of the filesystem, leaving large chunks of unused space open in-between. This means, there is almost always enough space somewhere to write out a file with all its bits together. OSX does get fragmentation, but except in situations where your drive is very near full, it's generally low enough to be a non-issue.