NTFS-3G is a free, read-and-write NTFS file-system driver for your Mac. The tool allows Mac OS X users to write to memory sticks / flash drives larger than 4GB (formatted with NTFS). Available as a free download, the new version (2009.2.1) introduces 'recover' and 'norecover' mount options, and several other changes and fixes.

The NTFS-3G driver is a freely and commercially available and supported read/write NTFS driver for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, NetBSD, Solaris, Haiku, and other operating systems. According to its maker, the driver provides safe and fast handling of the Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 file systems and is used by millions of computers, consumer electronics devices for reliable data exchange, and referenced in more than 25 computer books.

NTFS-3G makes quality tests and supports a trustable, feature rich and high performance solution for hardware platforms for their respective users who need to reliably interoperate with NTFS on different operating systems.

Main features of the NTFS-3G Driver include the ability to format NTFS volumes via diskutil, automatic read-write mounting of NTFS volumes, customizable locale settings on a per-volume basis, waits for MacFUSE 'mounted' notification prior to handing drives to Finder and last, but not least, an opt-out solution for volumes you may want mounted read-only via Apple's NTFS driver.

New in NTFS-3G Driver 2009.2.1 are the above-mentioned 'recover' and 'norecover' mount options. According to the changelog, the former option will cause the driver to recover and repair a corrupted or inconsistent NTFS volume if it's possible. The default behavior is 'recover.'

A trio of fixes have also been introduced, including:

· The driver crashed when it tried to read a highly fragmented file or directory which was either corrupted or unreadable due to a hardware error. Upgrade is recommended.
· The driver incorrectly returned 'Permission denied' error message if a requested extended attribute namespace wasn't supported.
· The lack of file backup timestamp support confused some applications on OS X.

Additional changes (including a Linux-specific tweak) are:

- The user extended attribute namespace is supported by default on Linux.
- A volume having unclean journal file is recovered and mounted by default. The 'norecover' mount option can be used to disable this behavior.

Download NTFS-3G 2009.2.1 (Free)