Extending my last discussion of NTFS support for Linux, attaching NTFS to Mac OSX machines can be a headache as well! While Mac OSX does include support to read from NTFS volumes, no such luck on writing to them.
Like most Linux apps, ntfs-3g can also be ported to Mac OSX. And lucky for us there’s already a pre-built installer too for Mac OSX (yea!). You can find it here (http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/).
WARNING! When I installed this there was an NTFS formatted flash drive in my Mac Pro which got hosed (technical term) after the install. The contents of the disk were not even viewable on Windows systems (booooo!). Time to run some forensics on it to see if I can recover any of the data.
That being said, ntfs-3g worked just as advertised (apart from losing my flash data). It overrides the Mac OSX NTFS support mechanism for its own. The app places a new item to your System Preferences from which you can change settings, disable it in favor of the native NTFS support (read only), or uninstall it.
Why not simply format my disks in a FAT format you say? Minimum file size of course, we can only go to 4 gig with FAT. My needs for more stem from the use of large files created by virtual machines.