We've been experiencing a lot of corrupted $MFT files when using the latest NTFS-3G driver on linux, usually happens when an end-user makes the unfortunate mistake of unplugging a USB drive without properly running safe-removal.

I noticed on many of the Mac forums the solution seems to be to not utilize the write-caching feature, which will degrade performance somewhat but lead to increased stability. On Mac, they can set the option in the console but it isn't clear to me how we'd implement the same on a Linux install. How can we achieve this?

Thanks in advance

Hi,


For USB keys, data written is kept longer in the cache, probably because they are slow and/or to make them last longer. This is unrelated to ntfs-3g, and I am not aware of any recent change.

You can mount with option "sync" to bypass the write cache. I normally advise against it, as this will reduce the speed and shorten the life of the device. If your USB keys are automatically mounted after they are plugged in, you will also have to find how to act on default mount options....

Note : you make me notice there is no mention of this option in the manual, but it is available since 2011.1.15.

Regards

Jean-Pierre