NTFS read/write stable enough?
 

For the last 10 months my FAT32 formatted 1 TB RAID 0 setup has been running like a champ in my linux home server (Ubuntu 7.10), but the 4 GB file size limitation is killing me! At the time I wasn't too confident in the stableness of Linux and NTFS writing, that's why I went with FAT32 (I'm sticking with Windows formats because I'll have to move this setup to Windows Server down the road).

Is it now safe to run a [home] server with NTFS and Linux?

ntfs-3g seems OK to me, I think it can be trusted now.

I'd second what BrianL said. I've been using an NTFS partition (reading and writing around 2gb a day) with ntfs-3g for 2 years and never had any problems whatsoever. It was a throwback to a dual boot system (which hasn't been dual booted for 18 months :) ), and I never got around to just wiping the partition and re-formatting.

That said, the ntf-3g process does tend to use quite a bit of CPU, and reading/writing is fairly slow. Maybe things have got better recently (I've not updated it in while).

The problem with NTFS is that (last I looked), if you get a filesystem error, it still needs to be fixed from Windoze.
Make sure you keep a bootable 'doze system around (but if you didn't, why would one think of NTFS anyway).

Don't be too sure. We had a thread here recently where Linux system couldn't handle large files and turned out problem was those large files were stored on a NTFS partition.

My system consists of a docking bay in which I can insert any of several operating system hard drives and a 320 GB drive permanently installed. The 320 GB drive was formatted NTFS from the Windows OS drive. I have accessed it read/write from Ubuntu 6.10, 7.10 and 8.04 with only one issue.

I copied a file with a name like
to the NTFS drive from Ubuntu. It was a screen shot of some sort of error I had received on a web page and the screen print tool created the name. When I booted again to Windows XP I received the message that the drive needed to be chkdsk(ed). I allowed this to proceed and it barked about some invalid files. However, the OS then came up and seemed to be no worse for the wear.

I tried to open the png file in Windows and received an error that the file was not there. I tried to delete it and got the same message. I though I had dome some damage to my NTFS partition.

However... the problem was with the file name. : and " are not allowed in Windows file names. I renamed the file next time I booted Ubuntu and was later able to access and delete it from Windows.

So - be careful in naming files on the NTFS partition when using Linux!

Also - I cannot run a VMWare virtual machine from VMWare player nor Workstation running on Linux when the VM files are on the NTFS partition. They work fine if the VM Player is running on Windows(?)

Ken