NTFS on Linux

March 31, 2025

Heads up if you're trying to mount an NTFS-formatted drive in Linux. Filesystem type ntfs3 is quite different from ntfs-3g.

ntfs3 is the newer in-kernel implementation of NTFS written by Paragon Software.

ntfs-3g is an old FUSE (userspace) driver. It's generally considered to be slower than the in-kernel driver and is an older implementation.

If you just use ntfs or auto in your mount command or fstab, which filesystem implementation you'll use is a tossup AFAIK. My system seemed to default to ntfs-3g. Better to choose which one you want explicitly.

For my purposes, the in-kernel ntfs3 driver is better because I wanted a non-root user to be able to mount an external drive with an fstab entry. I was able to make that happen with an entry like:

UUID=7CC845FDC845B5E4 /media/someuser/backup ntfs3 noauto,user,rw,uid=1000,gid=1000,iocharset=utf8,windows_names,umask=000,iocharset=utf8,dmask=027,fmask=137,noexec 0 2

With ntfs-3g, giving non-root users the ability to mount drives is a bit more complicated and annoying.

More info about ntfs3 available in the kernel docs: https://docs.kernel.org/filesystems/ntfs3.html