Tuxera Inc. is a Finnish software company that develops and sells

file systems In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...

software. Its most popular products are Tuxera

NTFS New Technology File System (NTFS) is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft. Starting with Windows NT 3.1, it is the default file system of the Windows NT family. It superseded File Allocation Table (FAT) as the preferred fil ...

and Tuxera exFAT, both available on a number of platforms including

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

, Android, QNX and

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

. Tuxera's customers include a number of consumer electronics manufacturers in mobile phones, tablets, TVs, set-top boxes, automotive infotainment and storage markets. Tuxera NTFS for Mac provides read/write connectivity to Windows-formatted hard drives for macOS. The company was founded in 2008 and is currently headquartered in

Espoo Espoo (, ; sv, Esbo) is a city and municipality in the region of Uusimaa in the Republic of Finland. It is located on the northern shore of the Gulf of Finland, bordering the cities of Helsinki, Vantaa, Kirkkonummi, Vihti and Nurmijärv ...

, Finland. Tuxera's other offices are located in the US,

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and sharing a Korean Demilitarized Zone, land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Cr ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwee ...

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the no ...

and

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

History

The origin of the company dates back to the

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...

NTFS development in the late 1990s.

had been introduced in 1993 by Microsoft as the file system for

Windows NT Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released on July 27, 1993. It is a processor-independent, multiprocessing and multi-user operating system. The first version of Win ...

. At that time Anton Altaparmakov emerged as the lead developer and maintainer of the Linux NTFS kernel driver. Meanwhile, Szabolcs Szakacsits continued to lead a platform-independent project under the name

NTFS-3G NTFS-3G is an open-source cross-platform implementation of the Microsoft Windows NTFS file system with read/write support. NTFS-3G often uses the FUSE file system interface, so it can run unmodified on many different operating systems. It is r ...

. In 2006, NTFS-3G became the first driver to gain full read and write support. Commercial activity started in 2007 and the company was founded next year. In 2009 the company signed agreements with Microsoft, which was followed by global expansion and establishing the collaboration with chipset vendors and software platform companies. In February 2011 Tuxera joined the

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit technology consortium founded in 2000 as a merger between Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group to standardize Linux, support its growth, and promote its commercial adoption. Addi ...

, which was an expected step as for many years Tuxera has contributed to the

Linux kernel The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally authored in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU ...

. In July 2019 Tuxera acquired

Datalight Datalight was a privately held software company specializing in power failsafe and high performance software for preserving data integrity in embedded systems. The company was founded in 1983 by Roy Sherrill, and is headquartered in Bothell, Was ...

, to strengthen its internal storage offering and expertise in

flash memory Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. Both use ...

and flash management software.

Embedded products

Microsoft NTFS by Tuxera (formerly Tuxera NTFS)

Tuxera NTFS is a performance optimized, fail-safe, fully compatible NTFS file system driver. It ships for example in smart TVs, set-top boxes, smartphones, tablets, routers, NAS and other devices. It is available for Android and other Linux platforms, QNX,

WinCE Windows Embedded Compact, formerly Windows Embedded CE, Windows Powered and Windows CE, is an operating system subfamily developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows Embedded family of products. Unlike Windows Embedded Standard, which is ba ...

Series 40 Series 40, often shortened as S40, is a software platform and application user interface (UI) software on Nokia's broad range of mid-tier feature phones, as well as on some of the Vertu line of luxury phones. It was one of the world's most wi ...

Nucleus RTOS Nucleus RTOS is a real-time operating system (RTOS) produced by the Embedded Software Division of Mentor Graphics, a Siemens Business, supporting 32- and 64-bit embedded system platforms. The operating system (OS) is designed for real-time embedd ...

and

VxWorks VxWorks is a real-time operating system (or RTOS) developed as proprietary software by Wind River Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Aptiv. First released in 1987, VxWorks is designed for use in embedded systems requiring real-time, determi ...

. Supported architectures are

ARM architecture ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures for computer processors, configured ...

MIPS architecture MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures (ISA)Price, Charles (September 1995). ''MIPS IV Instruction Set'' (Revision 3.2), MIPS Technologies, ...

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple– IBM– ...

SuperH SuperH (or SH) is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computing (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Hitachi and currently produced by Renesas. It is implemented by microcontrollers and microprocessors for embedded systems. At the ...

and

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...

Microsoft exFAT by Tuxera (formerly Tuxera exFAT)

Tuxera exFAT technology is used for SDXC memory card support. Tuxera was the first independent vendor to receive legal access to exFAT and TexFAT specifications, source code and verification tools from Microsoft. Tuxera exFAT can be found in automotive infotainment systems, Android phones and tablets from ASUS,

Fujitsu is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services corporation, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. Fujitsu is the world's sixth-largest IT services provider by annual revenue, and the la ...

Panasonic formerly between 1935 and 2008 and the first incarnation of between 2008 and 2022, is a major Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation, headquartered in Kadoma, Osaka. It was founded by Kōnosuke Matsushita in 1918 as a lightbulb ...

Pantech Pantech Inc. ( ko, 주식회사 팬택) is a South Korean company that manufactures mobile phones. Established in 1991, its market is mainly domestic with partners in the United States, Japan, China, Europe and finally Vietnam. In 2012 Pantech ...

and others.

Microsoft FAT by Tuxera (formerly Tuxera FAT)

Tuxera FAT software provides interoperability and support for storage types such as

SD memory card Secure Digital, officially abbreviated as SD, is a proprietary format, proprietary non-volatile memory, non-volatile Flash memory, flash memory card format developed by the SD Association, SD Association (SDA) for use in portable devices. The s ...

CF card CompactFlash (CF) is a flash memory mass storage device used mainly in portable electronic devices. The format was specified and the devices were first manufactured by SanDisk in 1994. CompactFlash became one of the most successful of the ea ...

Memory Stick The Memory Stick is a removable flash memory card format, originally launched by Sony in late 1998. In addition to the original Memory Stick, this family includes the Memory Stick PRO, a revision that allows greater maximum storage capacity an ...

SSD A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is a ...

, HDD via USB,

SATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard t ...

eSATA SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard t ...

, MMC and others. It is used by chipset and hardware manufacturers, and software and system integrators for full compliance with Microsoft patent licenses and GPL.

NTFS-3G

NTFS-3G is the original

free-software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

"community edition" driver used widely in

distributions, including

Fedora A fedora () is a hat with a soft brim and indented crown.Kilgour, Ruth Edwards (1958). ''A Pageant of Hats Ancient and Modern''. R. M. McBride Company. It is typically creased lengthwise down the crown and "pinched" near the front on both side ...

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...

, and others. On April 12, 2011 it was announced that

Ntfsprogs Ntfsprogs was a collection of free Unix utilities for managing the NTFS file system used by the Windows NT operating system (since version 3.1) on a hard disk partition. 'ntfsprogs' was the first stable method of writing to NTFS partitions in ...

project was merged with

VelocityFS by Tuxera (formerly Tuxera Flash File System)

Tuxera also develops and commercializes its own proprietary

Flash file system A flash file system is a file system designed for storing files on flash memory–based storage devices. While flash file systems are closely related to file systems in general, they are optimized for the nature and characteristics of flash me ...

. Due to its

fail-safe In engineering, a fail-safe is a design feature or practice that in the event of a specific type of failure, inherently responds in a way that will cause minimal or no harm to other equipment, to the environment or to people. Unlike inherent safe ...

technology it can be found for instance in vehicles and cars, integrated with the

event data recorder An event data recorder (EDR), more specifically motor vehicle event data recorder (MVEDR), similar to an accident data recorder (ADR) sometimes referred to informally as an automotive black box (by analogy with the common nickname for flight re ...

to make sure the data recorded from sensors is consistent even in case of a crash.

Tuxera FAT+

In 2017, Tuxera introduced FAT+, a file system implementation for

Universal Flash Storage Universal Flash Storage (UFS) is a flash storage specification for digital cameras, mobile phones and consumer electronic devices. It was designed to bring higher data transfer speed and increased reliability to flash memory storage, while red ...

cards and removable storage that is compatible with

FAT32 File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed for personal computers. Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on hard disks and other devices. It is often supported for compatibility reasons b ...

but without the file size limitation of 4 GiB. It is royalty free for UFS card host devices and a standard recommended by the Universal Flash Storage Association.

Consumer products

AllConnect

AllConnect is a mobile app that allows to stream music, photos and videos from Android devices to

DLNA Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA; originally named Digital Home Working Group, DHWG) was founded by a group of PC and consumer electronics companies in June 2003 (with Intel in the lead role) to develop and promote a set of interoperability ...

receivers (smart TVs, set-top-boxes, wireless speakers, etc.). It was launched on November 12, 2013 under the name of Streambels.

Microsoft NTFS for Mac by Tuxera (formerly Tuxera NTFS for Mac)

Microsoft NTFS for Mac by Tuxera allows macOS computers to read and write NTFS partitions. By default, macOS provides only read access to NTFS partitions. The latest stable version of the driver is 2020.1, which added support for

Apple silicon Apple silicon is a series of system on a chip (SoC) and system in a package (SiP) processors designed by Apple Inc., mainly using the ARM architecture. It is the basis of most new Mac computers as well as iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Apple TV, ...

Macs. With the introduction of

System Integrity Protection System Integrity Protection (SIP, sometimes referred to as rootless) is a security feature of Apple's macOS operating system introduced in OS X El Capitan (2015) (OS X 10.11). It comprises a number of mechanisms that are enforced by the kernel. A ...

(SIP) by

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancest ...

in OS X El Capitan, usage of third-party software in Disk Utility is no longer possible. As a workaround, Microsoft NTFS for Mac by Tuxera ships together with Tuxera Disk Manager to facilitate the format and maintenance of NTFS volumes in macOS. Currently the software supports 13 languages: Arabic, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. The software supports 64-bit kernels, including

OS X El Capitan OS X El Capitan ( ) () is the twelfth major release of macOS (named OS X at the time of El Capitan's release), Apple Inc.'s desktop and server operating system for Macintosh. It focuses mainly on performance, stability, and security. Followin ...

. It supports NTFS extended attributes and works with virtualization and encryption solutions including Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion.

SD Memory Card Formatter

Tuxera, in association with

SD Association The SD Association (SDA) is an American nonprofit organization that sets standards for the SD memory card format. SanDisk, Panasonic (Matsushita) and Toshiba formed the SD Association in January 2000. In 2010, the SDA had approximately 1,000 ...

, developed the official formatting application for Secure Digital memory cards, which is available as a free download for Windows and macOS.

References

{{Reflist, 2 Software companies of Finland