Last year, out of necessity to figure out which tool to use, I posted a comparison of Tuxera and Paragon NTFS drivers on macOS Sierra. I just bought a shiny new too-expensive-and-questionably-fit-for-sale MacBook Pro 2018, and the question is newly prescient. Some things have changed – we’re on High Sierra looking to Mojave now, both drivers have new versions out, and this new machine now has not only USB 3.1 Gen2, but more generally, 160GBit/s I/O that could fully saturate virtually any storage device you could plug into it. That almost includes some hypothetical external RAMdisk. Part of my plan for this machine going forward is to start running space-intense tasks like VMs and my photo library from an external NVMe SSD that can actually utilize that silly bandwidth, and may itself be shared with Windows 10 machines, so here we are.
What’s the same?
Licensing (kind of). Paragon still charges $20 for their NTFS driver, licensed per-machine with no upgrades. Tuxera still charges $31 for thiers, on a per-user basis with free upgrades to new versions. Winner: Tuxera. Except, there are some extenuating circumstances at the moment: Tuxera’s currently on sale for $18, and Paragon has released a package suite of drivers which includes free upgrades, and is $50. These factors make things a little less straightforward, but still I feel sum up in Tuxera’s favor. (UPDATE: Originally, I thought the package suite was on SALE for $50, but I think that’s actually the normal price and $100 is what you’d pay if you bought each alone. That makes Paragon a pretty darn good deal.)
What’s different?
Features and interface. Paragon has developed significantly since last year. It has some pretty looking tools and interfaces, although I don’t think they change much in a practical sense. It now comes with a pretty menu item which shows your drives and offers quick access repair/mounting/etc. If you don’t find that useful, you can turn it off.
Tuxera is pretty much unchanged.
The UI differences are sort of neither here nor there, although for my money, change is good. Minor point to Paragon for making an obvious effort to keep pace with Mojave.
Performance comparison
Long story short: Paragon pretty much smokes Tuxera. For spinning disks, the performance comparison is mostly unchanged – they’re both about the same, and performance varies ±10MB/s on the benchmark anyway depending on the direction of the wind. But the SSD performance delta has expanded from about 40% better for Paragon to more like 75% better for Paragon. Caveat emptor: this is moving from a 2.5GBit/s ExpressCard bottleneck on my old machine to the SSD’s internal flash bottleneck on the new one, but still – Paragon couldn’t quite saturate the ExpressCard on my old test, and now can just about saturate the SSD. These numbers are about what I get running a benchmark on a Windows machine with USB 3.0. Tuxera also improved over the old benchmark, as you can see, but not by nearly enough to even maintain that performance delta. Paragon is a clear and commanding winner here.
| Disk | Driver | Connection | 2017 Read (MB/s) | 2017 Write (MB/s) | 2018 Read (MB/s) | 2018 Write (MB/s) | Winner? |
| Internal SSD | (APFS) | NVMe | 2696.2 | 2646 | |||
| SSD | Paragon | USB3 | 187.3 | 167.2 | 428 | 422 | Paragon (75%) |
| SSD | Tuxera | USB3 | 133.1 | 119 | w/ caching: 242 w/o: 225 | w/ caching: 233 w/o: 105 | pretty reproduceable |
| HDD | Paragon | USB3 | 106.8 | 104.9 | 90 | 92 | Tie |
| HDD | Tuxera | USB3 | 104.7 | 103.6 | w/ caching: 97 w/o: 103 | w/ caching: 102 w/o: 80 | Both pretty variable. |
A note about caching
One thing I’m unclear on is how Paragon handles file system caching vs Tuxera. Tuxera offers the option to turn it off, at a performance penalty (that the benchmarks clearly show). Paragon offers no such option, so it’s unclear to me if the driver is doing caching or not. On Windows, I have write caching turned off by default for external devices since it improves FS resilience in sudden-disconnect scenarios, which can be tough to avoid especially with portables. This doesn’t seem to have a huge impact on performance, where it certainly does here. Oddly, Tuxera seems to be impacted even on read by having caching disabled, which I wouldn’t have expected to be noticeable in these tests.
Conclusion
Now that I’m much more performance-conscious in my driver choice, I’m much more inclined to switch to Paragon. For now, I’m going to run the trial and decide how I feel at the end of that. It seems likely I’ll buy the package deal for $50 with future upgrades, even though I don’t really need the other drivers. Plus, I already have a Tuxera license to cover other machines where I’m less performance-conscious.
WOW that’s exactly what I need! It’s quite a coincidence that I decided to pick up a 2018 15-inch macbookpro today. FYI, I used to love Tuxera for its cheaper price and free updates, but reading your review changed my mind! Definitely wanna try Paragon and thank you for your fruitful and informative review~!
Happy to help! Yeah – well, now that I own a license, the idea of spending 2x the price for unlimited updates, and still having the cheaper option already bought for my “other” machines is pretty palatable. It’d be a no-brainer if it Paragon was licensed per-user, but I’ll take that package. Plus, the other things included ARE pretty useful – Windows driver for HFS+? That’ll for sure come in handy on my primary windows machine.
Thanks for your quick reply Alex! Well I’m a little confused considering the fact that probably right now I only work with Mac so I’m not in that instant need of other drivers included in that suite. So what if I get a Paragon for High Sierra, will i receive free-updates for Mojave or future OS updates? Again, very constructive comments!
If you buy Paragon now, I’m sure you’ll get compatibility releases for Mojave since it currently supports the beta. The NEXT major release, maybe not.
Got it! Very helpful!!
[…] Update! I revisited this question with a modern computer and a slightly different outcome. See that article here! […]
Thank you for your updated article. I’m currently walking into the waters of Apple computers. My son Alan works for them and we’ve had apple pads and phones for a number of years now. But the computers are another case. I’ve obtained several of the old mac pro towers with the handles. While old they are no doubt the best put together piece of hardware I’ve ever seen. I’m moving my network services from Windows over. Right now I have both Tuxera and Paragon on a snow leopard box. All the drives are Seagate and I was able to get the free Paragon version but I could only see two of the 4 internal drives and none of the externals. It was running Maverick but the network sharing apple decided to change out was not tolerable.. Hence snow leopard. Looking for a solution, both companies were kind enough to supply me with older versions of their product to use with the older version of the MAC OS.. I’ve got 10 TB in the box and 18 TB connected with USB right now. Mind you I don’t have a stop watch to anything but in the course of moving large amounts of files I have not noticed a performance difference between the two products. However, I did noticed that an external exFat volume is read write when Tuxera is active but read only under paragon. I started looking for an answer and came across your posts After reading both I’m in the process of moving everything off that exFat drive elsewhere, then format it NTFS. Another issue is the Tuxera ntfs format. I seem to have the capability to format both ntfs and Tuxera ntfs. I have yet to discern what the differences are of that are
Best I’m aware, the only difference between “NTFS” and “Tuxera NTFS” is that one uses the Tuxera driver to do the formatting, and the other uses Paragon. FWIW, I would have expected things to go haywire having both installed at once – I wouldn’t.
Thanks for the feedback 🙂 I’ve removed the Paragon NTFS off the Snow Leopard box and left Tuxera NTFS on it. Did not seem to have any issues with any of the Seagate drives including the external exfat volume. I picked up 4 Seagate 8 TB externals, I plan to move all the data of the exfat disk to one of those 8 TB Seagate drives and then format the exfat to NTFS. The Snow Leopard box is working great as a file server now. The former Windows 2012 server has been shutdown a a few weeks now. I’ll use that for VM testing. I picked up a couple more of the older MAC Pro towers off craigslist and a couple PCI sata cards. Lets see what I can do with those 🙂