this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 47 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Dropping the old NTFS driver.

Good stuff. Hasn't there always been confusion on mounting your NTFS drive using the old driver vs the new?

[–] [email protected] 46 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Indeed. But I think some confusion will still remain as long as the ntfs-3g FUSE driver is still included by distros. Because right now, you have to explicitly specify the filesystem type as ntfs3 if you want to use the new in-kernel driver, otherwise it would use ntfs-3g. And most guides on the web still haven't been updated to use ntfs3 in the fstab, so I'm afraid this confusion will continue to persist for some time.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I've had bad experiences with ntfs3 anyway, so it's probably for the best that ntfs-3g is the default. Also last I checked ntfs3 had effectively been orphaned by paragon (the developers), is that still the case?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (4 children)

ntfs3 has had several improvements in 6.2 and 6.8, and it's been pretty stable for me of late. I use it to share/backup my Steam game library mainly + for my portable drives for general data storage/local backups, and haven't had any issues.

It's not orphaned. There was a bit of lull after it was introduced in kernel 5.15, and yes it was a bit unstable in the 5.x series, but it's been pretty good since 6.2 where they finally introduced the nocase and windows_names mount options. The performance improvements are worth it if you use NTFS heavily, so I would personally recommend switching.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I would have loved to take that performance before I converted my data drives to ext4, however it's just inherently not stable.

Sometimes If you have a power loss you have to run chkdsk on Windows to get out of ro mode, no?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

There's no need to run chkdsk from Windows, you can run ntfsfix directly from Linux:

sudo ntfsfix /dev/path --clear-dirty
[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

For me, Steam (on Linux) has been periodically corrupting the ntfs disk, I do use it on windows too and not even win hybrid/fastboot/hibernation disabled helps.

May I see what mount options you use for the ntfs3 driver in fstab? I do not currently have the nocase and windows_names ...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Mine looks like this:

UUID=blah /media/games ntfs3 uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=000,rw,user,exec,nofail,nocase,windows_names 0 0

If you're copy-pasting this, make sure your uid and gid matches of course.

But the key thing for Steam is you need to have your compatdata folder on a Linux partition, because Proton creates folders with invalid characters (like :). windows_names would prevent that of course, and thus prevents corruption, but it would cause Proton to fail since if can't create those folders/files. So you'll need to symlink that folder on your NTFS disk to point to a folder on a Linux partition.

Eg:

$ mkdir -p ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata
$ ln -s ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata /media/games/Steam/steamapps/ 

Of course, before you run the above, you'll need to delete the existing compatdata folder from the NTFS disk.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Ahh thanks! That's good to know!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Is this for read-only use? Or is it usable also for modifying files?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

It's r/w, if you specify the filesystem type as ntfs3. I believe if you use just ntfs it'll be read-only, to mimic the behaviour of the old driver, for compatibility reasons.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

You know I didn't realize until now there was actually "confusion". I just thought I was a dolt for forgetting the package name or confusing the command name. Heh!