It's hard to believe how insanely long it took, and still is taking to get a production-ready, solid ntfs driver in linux.
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
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once i was copying files from a windows install on ntfs fs to an external ntfs drive on an old laptop. somehow the system got so hot, it permanently damaged the GPU, and left marks on the display
This is one of those things that sounds impossible but then I've also seen when someone I know used social engineering to get a malicious build of a free video game on to the laptop of someone else I know to delete all his files remotely and for some reason it actually overheated uncontrollably and melted. I didn't believe that either until I went with him to get security footage from the university for the warranty claim.
That was early windows xp era though. I'd really like to believe a damned filesystem driver cand cause that kind of damage, please for the love of dog...
That was early windows xp era though
I know AMD had some issues a long time ago with thermal protection. Tom's Hardware made a video on YouTube where they tested what happens when removing the CPU cooler on a system running Quake 3. As I remember it, all the Intel CPUs survived but most, if not all, the AMD CPUs died, one also damaging the motherboard.
Damn, I remember that video, blast from the past.. Also 29C? Shit, my gpu runs at 80 a lot of the time.
Maybe I assumed incorrelctly what haplened, I can't find a photo of it, it happened years ago.
Basically I wanted to back up a pretty old laptop with win7. I booted up an arch linix live usb. Started cp-ing from internal to external driver without default NTFS driver. Afer a few minites i noticed some random colored pixels creeping in from the top right side of the monitor. Most of the screen should have been black because it was displaying the terminal. By the time it finished there were multiple different lenght rows with random bright colors. After restarting on win7 these presisted. During a few days the lined got shorter, but never disapeared even after years.
No idea how this happened
My experience of using NTFS on Linux was downloading a torrent on a dual boot laptop and it shutting down due to overheating. This was more than a decade ago, so hopefully it's a lot better by now.
I've been transferring files from old NTFS drives formatted for Windows on a Debian machine without issue.
Reading from NTFS is nearly flawless. Writing and actively using it is pretty bad occasionally though, to the point where steam doesn't support it and recommends against it for game libraries on Linux.
My experience was miserable attempting to do so, to the point that it was better to just nuke everything across 4 drives and start over
That may be an old issue, but I just set up a couple of NTFS drive Steam libraries on Linux last week and it didn't give me any errors or warnings about the drive format. But I did have big issues with the Flatpak edition of Steam - it couldn't even write to a local second ext4 partition. Had to switch to .deb Steam install to fix all that
You might know this already, but some (all?) flatpaks are denied access to most drives in the system. I've used Flatseal to address that issue when it comes up, though there may be better ways.
Yes I did read up on that and tried using Flatseal for permissions granting, but it didn't work so I didn't troubleshoot it very far before doing to the .deb install
That sound more like a hardware issue, no?
Nah, the same thing was fine under windows. The old linux ntfs driver was just horribly inefficient and 100%'ed the cpu for too long. The hardware worked as intended - it shut down to avoid thermal damage. Possibly there was some lower "speedstep" the OS could have told the CPU to use, but that didn't seem to happen on this combination of OS and hardware.
Running at 100% CPU for any amount of time should be fully expected by the manufacturer and should ramp up fans and throttle the CPU if necessary. Those are hardware functions.
Just to add on to your comment: Hardware should not "shut down" due to software operations. Max fan speed and execution slow down, yes, but not a shut down, unless your computer has a function of shutting down when getting hot. Normal operation should just keep going.
Emergency thermal shut-off is a very common function in various pieces of computer hardware. And if throttling doesn't help it should indeed shut down, rather than cause damage.
Perhaps it’s the misty air of memory, but I truly hope this new driver is as good as the 20 year old one we used to use…