Does the 2022-04-04 Raspberry PI OS update contain the new Paragon NTFS support

Question

The release notes show Linux kernel 5.15.30 which is supposed to contain the new Paragon NTFS module, but after updating I see no performance improvement over the old NTFS-3g support. Perhaps there's additional configuration steps I need to follow?

Answer 1

It worked out-of-the-box for me (although I'm testing on kernel 5.15.76 / RaspiOS release 2022-09-22). You might need to specify mount -t ntfs3, if it does not default to it. Testing with an external USB HDD, its still not blazing fast, but there is a definite improvement:

ntfs3 (new Paragon NTFS)

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo mount -t ntfs3 /dev/sda1 hdd
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ mount
[...]
/dev/sda1 on /home/pi/hdd type ntfs3 (rw,relatime,uid=0,gid=0,iocharset=utf8)
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cd hdd/
pi@raspberrypi:~/hdd $ dd if=/dev/zero of=write.test bs=100M count=1 oflag=dsync
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB, 100 MiB) copied, 4.32912 s, 24.2 MB/s
pi@raspberrypi:~/hdd $ cd
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo umount hdd

Result: 24.2 MB/s

ntfs-3g

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 hdd
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ mount
[...]
/dev/sda1 on /home/pi/hdd type fuseblk (rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,allow_other,blksize=4096)
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cd hdd/
pi@raspberrypi:~/hdd $ dd if=/dev/zero of=write.test bs=100M count=1 oflag=dsync
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB, 100 MiB) copied, 14.1101 s, 7.4 MB/s
pi@raspberrypi:~/hdd $ cd
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo umount hdd

Result: 7.4 MB/s

ntfs-3g -o big_writes

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo mount -t ntfs-3g -o big_writes /dev/sda1 hdd
pi@raspberrypi:~/hdd $ mount
[...]
/dev/sda1 on /home/pi/hdd type fuseblk (rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,allow_other,blksize=4096)
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ cd hdd/
pi@raspberrypi:~/hdd $ dd if=/dev/zero of=write.test bs=100M count=1 oflag=dsync
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB, 100 MiB) copied, 7.73435 s, 13.6 MB/s
pi@raspberrypi:~/hdd $ cd
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo umount hdd

Result: 13.6 MB/s

---

Version Info

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Debian
Description:    Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)
Release:        11
Codename:       bullseye
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 5.15.76-v8+ #1597 SMP PREEMPT Fri Nov 4 12:16:41 GMT 2022 aarch64 GNU/Linux

Note: This test was done on a RPi 3, so newer Pis (3+, 4) might further benefit from the better USB controllers and USB 3.0.