It has been favoured over FAT32 for a variety of reasons, with most users preferring it for its ability to store files over 4GB - a limitation on older file systems. New Technologies File System, or NTFS as it is commonly abbreviated to, was introduced by Microsoft in Windows NT 3.1 and slowly gained popularity with the release of Windows 2000 and XP. The software costs $19.95, has already been updated with full support for Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8). Luckily software like Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X exists to restore the missing link and make your NTFS volumes useful again. If your drives use an OS X-friendly filesystem like HFS+ or FAT then you won’t have a problem, but if you’ve got a rather chunky external drive formatted to NTFS (like I have) then you’re a bit stuck. You can read from NTFS volumes with no problems, but writing is another story. One of the drawbacks when switching from Windows to Mac is the lack of native NTFS support.
