Keep the external NTFS drive connected to the Mac.

If you have a lot of important files on it, reformatting is not recommended because it requires backups and time. If you own a brand-new and empty NTFS drive, reformatting it to a Mac-compatible file system is a good idea. Solution 2: Reformat the NTFS drive in Disk Utility Then you just directly use the drive and edit the Windows files as you like. The NTFS drives will be automatically (sometimes you may need to manually mount it) in read-write mode after it is connected to the Mac computer.

When choosing such a driver, be aware of its compatibility and usability.Īll you need to do is to download, install and launch it. It is a third-party program, so it needs to be installed on Mac. It is very helpful if you need to use different NTFS drives in macOS on a regular basis.

NTFS for Mac app is an NTFS disk driver to free read write NTFS on Mac. In this article, you will learn 3 free ways to write to NTFS drives in macOS. However, with the Windows still dominating the market, many storage devices, especially external hard drive and solid-state drives, come with NTFS format initially.īy default, macOS won’t allow you to write anything to the NTFS-formatted disk. That is to say, Microsoft NTFS and Linux file systems are not fully compatible with macOS. Besides file systems by Apple, it only grants full read and write access to Microsoft FAT file system family. To mount your NTFS drive, you’ll need to use Terminal.MacOS is a very exclusive operating system so that many file systems won’t fully work in it. So NTFS-3G is forced to write “live,” which degrades performance significantly. This happens because macOS does not have a buffer for writing to NTFS drives, nor the virtual memory to hold that buffer. Compared to the 500+ MB/s achieved by an SSD, the difference is dramatic. Transfer performance is slow, often limited to about 10 MB/s. You can download the package directly from the Tuxera website, from GitHub, or with Homebrew. With this Terminal command you can mount drives in macOS in a writable state. NTFS-3G is an open-source command-line program for writing to NTFS drives in macOS. Write support for NTFS drives can be added through open-source programs, paid programs, or Apple’s own experimental drivers. Your Mac can read NTFS drives, transferring content from the drives to another place, but it cannot write to NTFS drives.

Is it safe to write to ntfs on mac