With a new operating system comes new features. With new features comes new bugs. With new bugs come new and angry users, like me. If you’ve been using Snow Leopard’s native NTFS read/write support feature, you may want to immediately stop what you’re doing, and switch over to using NTFS-3G.

This new feature may work fine for you for a while, but you may eventually notice your system becoming very unresponsive, or poor in performance. With the case with our MacBook Pro, we’ve been getting CONSTANT beach balling, total system freezes, and worst yet, kernel panics (here, here, here, here). Looking at the first image, you can see that the kernel panic was due to the NTFS file system drivers just spazzing out. We ran into so many problems. Once we disabled native NTFS read/write support, our system was running just like new! No beach balls (they still come out every now and then, but only for a few seconds), freezes, or kernel panics! Life is good! We were fixing to give our MacBook Pro away, but we came up with this idea, which ended up being the cause of all of the problems.

The bottom line is that, if you’re using Snow Leopard’s native NTFS read/write support feature, disable it now. Instead, use NTFS-3G if you need to write to your NTFS drives/partitions.