NTFS-3G Sees Major Update w/ Faster Compression

Tuxera has released a new community version of their NTFS-3G FUSE file-system implementation. This release packs some new features.

The release history page on the Tuxera web-site notes the major changes for this new stable release, which is labelled version 2012.1.15 and was released on Sunday. This release incorporates a number of fixes, faster compression support, improvements to ntfsfix for fixing the NTFS file-system, ntfscp (an NTFS copy program) now supports the compression functionality, NTFS resizing improvements, and there's various other fixes too.

The community version of NTFS-3G 2012.1.15 can be downloaded from Tuxera.com. This is the file-system implementation where Tuxera claims NTFS is the fastest Linux file-system.

While NTFS-3G is commonly talked about for Linux, this FUSE-based (file-system in user-space) file-system is also supported under Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, the *BSDs, and even QNX and Haiku.

This continued work on the open-source NTFS file-system support comes at a time when Microsft is readying the ReFS support in Windows Server 8. The Microsoft Resilient File-System is designed to be the next-generation successor to the NTFS file-system and will be deemed production ready in this next Windows release due out in 2012. It will likely be a while before seeing Linux support for ReFS, based upon the pace of Microsoft exFAT support under Linux.