I have the latest Captive and FUSE versions installed, and the write performance to NTFS partitions is really slow, like 400kb/s. Is there any way to get better performance?

Not sure, but generally writing to NTFS is a bit dangerous anyway. I have actually hosed an XP installation by using NTFS write support. Since then (maybe 6 months ago), I only do it as a last resort (like using Knoppix to reset the admin password). You're really better off using a shared FAT32 partition.

Captive NTFS, as opposed to the kernel integrated NTFS write support is very safe.

however as it is using the native windows DLLs to read and write from the disk the performance is going to be very slow. this is because, unlike the WINE open source implementation of the windows API captive NTFS has to emulate the API. this emulation wastes precious CPU time which slows down both your machine and the file transfer speed.


as pljvaldez said, you are better off using a shared FAT32 partition.

FAT32 has a 4gb file size restriction. I guess I could keep big ISOs on a ReiserFS partition though.

Is there a clever way to convert all the partitions to FAT32, or do I have to just move things around and repartition empty space?

So you were using Captive NTFS? Since there was no other general purpose, free NTFS write support 6 months ago.

Where did you read this lie? Because you obviously never used any of them. See for example here a REAL COMPARISON:
http://linux.coconia.net/general/ntfs-tests.htm

That's interesting. Would you recommend I use NTFS-FUSE?

The (recent) userspace support seems very good. I didn't like the early ships of ntfsmount, but it seems well accepted now.
Haven't used it personally.
The in-kernel support is still lacking in some respects.

None of the above should be read as denigrating the work of the ntfsprogs folks. They have a *real* tough job and do it well.

From what their site says, the performance is good, and is completely safe. Sometimes you can't do something, like create more than 10 files in a directory, but for my purposes, that's fine.

You can try VMware. It has support to handle raw disk such as hard drives. If you tell linux to not mount it upon boot up, it will do fine.

Captive NTFS is safe as it gets for a free program. Linux NTFS write suport is said that it "works", but I will not use it for my data. The most reliable way to write to NTFS is through VMware+Windows 2000/XP or forget NTFS and put the data on a FAT32 partition. As always backup your data just in case either one corrupts your data.

This link claims that Captive is unsafe and Linux NTFS is safe.
http://linux.coconia.net/general/ntfs-tests.htm

How do I know who to believe? Personally I have never had trouble with Captive so I'm inclined to believe you, Electro. But is there any solid evidence either way?

The site saids neither are safe. It only shows which one is faster. What makes me wonder did NTFS-FUSE corrupt the filesystem just a little bit because Captive-FUSE failed the test that was done after the NTFS-FUSE test. A good tester will create two controls. One is a hard disk utility to clean or wipe the drive clean. Another is Norton Ghost to image the NTFS partition that has Windows.

What I have done if I had to test NTFS-FUSE and CAPTIVE-FUSE:
1) Image the Windows partition which is using NTFS
2) Wipe the drive clean
3) Put the image on the drive
4) Test NTFS-FUSE
5) wipe the drive clean
6) put the image on the drive
7) Test CAPTIVE-FUSE

Captive NTFS has fail-safe features. It does a test write before it writes, so that is another reason why it has low write throughput. I have not yet used either one. If I had to choose either one and VMware is not an option, I would pick Captive NTFS.

"good, fast, cheap - pick any two"

That applies to so many things it just ain't funny.

I might perform my own tests. I'll post them here when I'm done.

That would be useful :-) I've also found that Captive sometimes has corruption problems and some strange limitations e.g. related to files sizes, besides being extremely slow. The write test can't be a good explanation because that can't cause the 100 times performance degradation.

NTFS-FUSE has a limit on the number of files it can create in a directory (max. 10-40) and a few times it refuses to delete certain files, but no corruption or whatsoever problem and it's really fast.

BTW, imaging can be done very fast with ntfsclone and the image is even NTFS-FUSE mountable, testable (Captive also crashes here :-().