3dEyes**, of NaviTracker and Romashka fame, and who also did recent ports of SAMBA to BeOS has released a highly experimental NTFS driver for BeOS. This driver both reads from and writes to NTFS file systems. Currently, it can read files, folders, and symlinks; write to files, create new directories, files and symlinks, deleting files/directories, renaming and moving files, editing of volume labels and free space detection.

Not many operating systems beyond Windows support NTFS beyond reading, indeed only Linux has experimental write support as of the time of writing.

The driver can be downloaded here, and 3dEyes** is looking for testers. There are some known issues with the driver at this time, namely a possibility of disk errors after large operations (such as coping or deleting), which can be fixed with Windows chkdsk, and the possibility of a system hang when entering a folder with a very large number of files.

NTFS supports extended attributes, in a manner not hugely unlike BeOS does. Currently, the driver emulates filetype attributes for certain file suffixes, like the FAT driver does, however 3dEyes** hopes to implement compatibility with BFS attributes, as well as build the driver for Haiku.

He suggests initially testing it on an image file - the included mkntfs app allows you to create these, but also says "it's pretty much stable in it's current form, all known bugs have been fixed and it's very unlikely you'll loose your data."