Cryptosmith

My first-order attempts to put a modern portable file system on a portable USB device have failed. The Mac, of course, has its own, proprietary file system. OS X has limited support for the Windows NTFS, so my first attempt was to try to use NTFS. This has failed, though it worked for a few months first.

For some incomprehensible reason, OS X will not mount my portable hard drive if it is formatted in NTFS. It doesn’t matter whether I format it using the OS X Disk Utility or if I format it using Windows itself. It doesn’t matter if I do fast or slow formatting. Even worse, I can’t use my third party NTFS file software (Paragon’s package) with it. Nothing works.

My objective is to have a file system that takes large files. I seem to now be stuck with FAT 32, which is limited to files of 4GB or less. So I can’t create and carry an encrypted disk image within a FAT file system. What’s the point of having a file system limited to 4GB?

The NTFS problem is apparently well known among slightly more sophisticated Mac users.

There are numerous unsolved complaints about it on Paragon’s web site.

Paragon’s software (and indeed Apple’s) seems to work fine with hard wired disk drives and with a handful of external drives, but not for modern portable drives.

(Actually, that’s not true. I had a drive working fine till about 3 months ago when it died of an apparent head crash. Before that, it ran NTFS just fine. But no replacement drive has worked.)

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