Are there faster solutions for NTFS on Linux than NTFS-3G?

NTFS-3G is a stable read/write NTFS driver, but it is unfortunately extremely slow compared to both NTFS on Windows, and any native Linux filesystem. Not only is the access itself very slow due to use of FUSE, NTFS-3G does not have near the capability of Windows' native NTFS driver at NTFS's fragmentation avoidance systems. (I suspect use of NTFS under NTFS-3G is the cause of so many complains about NTFS becoming fragmented, because that rarely if ever happens on Windows)

Is there any (possibly nonfree) NTFS driver for Linux that isn't extremely slow?

EDIT: Most of the loads that will be going on inside this filesystem will be VMWare, which is why reasonable performance is particularly important.

Billy ONeal

Posted 2010-10-27T17:11:55.767

Reputation: 7 021

I see plenty of fragmented drives on windows. It's not as bad on 7, because it defrags in the background, but xp can easily get fragmented. – Joel Coehoorn – 2011-07-08T21:59:51.823

1@Joel: I generally only see fragmented drives on Windows when the drive is relatively full. I see fragmented drives on Linux boxes when the drive is close to empty. Even when the drive is full, it's usually much more fragmented on Linux boxes, and the fragments that are there are smaller chunks spaced out in less efficient ways. The Windows driver has several years on the Linux implementation, and it is not reverse engineered. It's not surprising that it would perform better. – Billy ONeal – 2011-07-08T22:57:23.133

@Joel: (For that matter, the Ext4 drivers available for Windows are just as bad at dealing with that filesystem as the NTFS implementations available for POSIX) – Billy ONeal – 2011-07-08T23:01:19.980

Answers

looking at http://www.tuxera.com/products/ntfs-open-source/ and the stats at http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-commercial/performance/ i do not think that you can get better speed than with tuxeras stuff.

akira

Posted 2010-10-27T17:11:55.767

Reputation: 52 754

Is there a place to actually buy the damn thing? :) +1. – Billy ONeal – 2010-10-27T17:53:01.503

http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/ ... just the community version, try if that newest thing solves your problem. if not contact tuxera and just ask where they hide their stuff that created that charts :) – akira – 2010-10-27T18:40:55.990

2@akira: Errr.. that's ntfs-3g, which is the same slow FUSE module I described earlier, and which is the lowest graph bar in the graphs indicated at your link. – Billy ONeal – 2010-10-28T02:58:41.007

@Billy ONeal: then do the 2nd part of my comment: "if not, contact tuxera and just ask where they ihde their stuff that created that charts". – akira – 2010-10-28T06:10:32.120

From what I can tell, their own is a Mac driver. Not a Linux one. – ewanm89 – 2010-10-28T13:17:52.640

then read again: http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-commercial/: "The Tuxera NTFS technology is based on our open source products, which have been in production use in millions of installations since 2000." and "You can contact our sales with filing in a form or sending email to sales@tuxera.com."

– akira – 2010-10-28T19:43:27.700

Phoronix did a whole write-up on the Tuxera Proprietary NTFS Kernel driver. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTU5Ng

When compared to a well written kernel driver, FUSE drivers are not in the same class. This whole NTFS situation 'grinds my gears'! I wrote about it on my answer to this other question http://superuser.com/questions/139452/kernel-ntfs-driver-vs-ntfs-3g/357949#357949

– J. M. Becker – 2011-11-21T22:36:50.993

In my experience, OS X can extend to Linux, the Paragon NTFS driver is 2-3 times faster than NTFS3g/Tuxera. On OS X, the Paragon driver is as fast as native NTFS.

path

Posted 2010-10-27T17:11:55.767

Reputation: 21

The only other ntfs driver I know of for linux is the kernel read only one, whether it's any faster at reading. Reading/writing ext2/3 volumes from windows with the appropriate IFS drivers is slow too.

As for ntfs on windows not causing fragmentation even just a fresh install of windows 7 on a 2TB ntfs volume has fragmented files. Windows fragments if it allows faster write speed, that is how it's designed.

ewanm89

Posted 2010-10-27T17:11:55.767

Reputation: 268

what about e4defrag? – osirisgothra – 2014-06-25T07:48:29.617

3ALL reasonable filesystems have fragmented files. Allowing files to fragment is required to have a performant filesystem. EXT3 and EXT4 fragment too -- just because no tool exists to deal with the problem doesn't mean it does not exist. There's no reason NTFS has to be slow -- it's slow mainly as a result of running on top of FUSE. – Billy ONeal – 2010-10-27T17:49:27.387

1I don't want to enter the flame war on FUSE or not-FUSE. However, fragmentation is much slower to happen on EXT or HFS (for Mac) than on NTFS. So fragmentation is a non-problem for many Mac or Linux users. HFS+ is even defragmenting on-the-fly and transparently files when necessary. Only Windows require defragmentation tools to be run manually, which is a bad design in the first place. – Huygens – 2010-10-27T21:55:13.327

1@Huygens: Fragmentation is not a problem for Windows users either. Only when using third party NTFS drivers do I have problems. They seem to be less intelligent w.r.t. how they allocate space when dealing with large files like VMWare images. (This is probably partially because there's no POSIX standard for sparse files) – Billy ONeal – 2010-10-28T03:00:04.283

1@Billy has this been improved in Vista or 7? I only have Windows at work and it's still XP which suffers a lot from fragmentation. – Huygens – 2010-10-28T20:28:49.807

@Huygens: I do not have problems on Windows XP. Sure, there are tools for Windows that will complain YOUR FILESYSTEM IS XXYYZZ% FRAGMENTED! Such tools exist to sell tools, not to be particularly useful. Just because there is no tool for EXTX (EXT3 or EXT4) that comes out and tells you such does not mean that fragmentation does not affect the file system. As I said above though, no filesystem is going to be able to a good job without some help preventing fragmentation of VMWare files. POSIX really needs to add sparse files to it's specs as I believe EXT4 (and others) already supports them. – Billy ONeal – 2010-10-28T21:15:48.563

1@Huygens: The defragmenters I use are freeware or even open source, and just give a list of fragmented files and how many fragments they are in. Even windows 7 fragments heavily. – ewanm89 – 2010-10-29T03:16:30.947

Also fsck on ext gives fragmentation data. The highest I got it on ext3 was 11% on a 99% full partition. It sacrifices write speed to keep the fragmentation lower than windows does. – ewanm89 – 2010-10-29T03:17:50.637

I know Billy! I don't use this kind of tools on Windows, nor do I have an internet security suite, or some other stuff like that. I use defragmentation when I'm trying to launch applications that are taking ages to launch or when Windows boot is getting slower... I also know that ext FS gets fragmented (you can see it with a fsck), but I never crossed the 15% line and I never notices slowing down. – Huygens – 2010-10-29T16:32:31.370

@Billy I also use large files for VirtualBox on NTFS external portable USB driver with plenty of spaces. I mostly use this VM from Linux and I don't see any big fragmentation (there is some). I'm using NTFS3g. My only concern is io wait which are high due to the USB latency and a bit also due to the user space stack. – Huygens – 2010-10-29T16:36:32.413