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.
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.
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 …
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.
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
andwindows_names
mount options. The performance improvements are worth it if you use NTFS heavily, so I would personally recommend switching.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?
There’s no need to run
chkdsk
from Windows, you can runntfsfix
directly from Linux:sudo ntfsfix /dev/path --clear-dirty
Is this for read-only use? Or is it usable also for modifying files?
It’s r/w, if you specify the filesystem type as
ntfs3
. I believe if you use justntfs
it’ll be read-only, to mimic the behaviour of the old driver, for compatibility reasons.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 …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.Ahh thanks! That’s good to know!