Why can I write files to Windows PCs over network, but not to local drives?

[imacken]

I can write files to Windows PCs over my network, but can't to Windows NTFS drives on my hack.

Why is that?

[mdnz01]

Writing on NTFS drives is disabled on Snow Leopard by default, since it's pretty unstable and not recommended. There are ways to enable this though.

[Bolsoe]

I can write files to Windows PCs over my network, but can't to Windows NTFS drives on my hack.

Why is that?

 

Because osx supports the smb protocol (which allows read and write operations to remote disks on windows servers), but has only read-only support for local ntfs. I believe this makes sense, as the remote smb-protocol is sort of open, but the ntfs file system specification is sort of closed.

However, I believe there exist commercial 3rd party extensions that allow write to local ntfs disks too.

[imacken]

Thanks. I'm aware of apps to write to local NTFS drives, but couldn't really understand how it is possible to write to remote NTFS drives, but not local.

[bluedragon1971]

Thanks. I'm aware of apps to write to local NTFS drives, but couldn't really understand how it is possible to write to remote NTFS drives, but not local.

 

Because it's not your Mac that is writing to the remote drive through the network, but the computer on the remote end. Your Mac is simply sending data through the network, the remote computer determines how to write it to the drive. The same thing happens when a Windows machine saves files through the network to a Mac HFS+ formatted disk. I've never understood why so many people have a problem understanding this.