Hope this can go here. Mods please shift if not correct. 
An informative article explaining various common file systems, the FUSE virtual file system and ntfs-3g development and use:
Thanks, there is some good history in that article, and helps explain why there was so much difficulty in the Linux world remaining compatible with Microsoft’s proprietary NTFS.
I have been using ntfs-3g for over 2 years now, and I am very happy with it. The only problem I had was with the older Linux ntfs driver not reading hundreds of Gigabytes of data backed up with the Linux ntfs-3g driver. MS-WinXP could read the backed up data, which makes me think to this date that the older Linux ntfs driver, despite the excellent work that was done on it, still had problems.
I too no longer reformat my newly purchased external USB/Firewire hard drives to VFAT (from NTFS) but rather I leave them formatted as NTFS (for maximum Windoze PC and Linux compatibility).
For newbies reading that article, especially the “Updating FUSE and ntfs-3g” section, it is not necessary to compile for the latest openSUSE versions. There are up to date rpm versions of NTFS-3G and fuse for openSUSE-10.2, 10.3, and 11.0, hence no need to compile. They can be found here:
Webpin
There also used to be versions for SuSE-10.0, and openSUSE-10.1, but with those versions of SuSE no longer being supported, the rpms have been removed from the various hosting web sites. Hence in case of those older versions, one may have to compile.
Its sort of unfortunate that such rpms (for older SuSE versions) are removed from file servers. Is web storage space still at a premium, like it once was? I think it would be useful that those controlling the file server content to still keep an “archive server” with the previously built rpms for older SuSE versions (for the use of the SuSE community) . No need IMHO to completely remove them, especially as IMHO not everyone wants to update to a more current SuSE version. Anyway, I diverge, and that thought of mine is not directly relevant to this thread.
Thanks again for posting the URL.