> I've been following this thread, and I'm wondering: why bother with NTFS > in the first place? If you have a mixed environment where you need > Windows to access your external hard disk, you might as well format it > with a FAT filesystem. Linux supports FAT natively, without making you > jump through burning loops. There could be many reasons why ntfs support is needed, such as reading a disk that is not your own. Also, keep in mind that FAT has a 4 GB file size limit.