Snow Leopard brings native NTFS write support... sort of

For quite some time, Mac OS X has been able to read NTFS drive, but not write to them. To do that you have to use a commercial (Paragon NTFS) or free (ntfs-3g, which I have been using for quite some time) 3rd party solution.

Nyxem, one of our readers, reports on his blog (in French) about a procedure he found out about on the MacRumors forums, that allows you to natively activate NTFS write support on Snow Leopard.

To do that you need to know the NTFS's drive's UUID or volume name, then add it to an OS X file called "fstab". The procedure requires some Terminal wizardry and has to be repeated for every single NTFS drive you want to write to, followed by a reboot every time you change the fstab file content.

There probably is a pretty good reason why Apple did not activate this feature, like the drivers not being ready for production or some legal issue with Microsoft's poorly-documented NTFS specs (more details on NTFS on Wikipedia).

Anyway, this is a hack to use with ALL DUE CAUTION. If you are not adventurous enough, simply use ntfs-3g, it's free as in beer and speech and works great.

Still, it's interesting to know that Apple has included (even in hidden form) NTFS write support in SNow Leopard, and the question is now to know what drivers they might be using: did they build their own, or are they using some variant of ntfs-3g?