There is supposed to be native support for Read/Write access to NTFS formatted drives from Max OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Word on the street is that this turned out to be unreliable and unstable so it is disabled by default (but it can be enabled from the command line). OS X still has stable native Read Only access to NTFS but you can’t write to it.
At least you can’t without paying something for Paragon NTFS or paying nothing for the open source Catacombae NTFS-3G for Mac OS X and FUSE for OS X (OSXFUSE). NTFS-3G is the NTFS Read/Write driver and FUSE is… well let’s just quote the relevant Wikipedia article:
Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) is a loadable kernel module for Unix-like computer operating systems that lets non-privileged users create their own file systems without editing kernel code. This is achieved by running file system code in user space while the FUSE module provides only a "bridge" to the actual kernel interfaces.
There was an older FUSE that I had originally found called MacFUSE which is the project from which OSXFUSE is derived but I had trouble finding 64 bit support. A lead from a blog called offTheHill brought me to OSXFUSE where I found 32 and 64 bit support ready to go in an easy to install DMG file.
I downloaded and installed the DMG files for NTFS-3G and OSXFUSE and unmounted and remounted the NTFS external drive and voila…. there was Read/Write access to the NTFS drive.
Obligatory warning: NTFS-3G is sometimes described as “experimental” given that there is no public specifications for the NTFS file system. However, this project is mature enough that I would trust it with my data.
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