When you plug an NTFS external hard drive into your Mac, you will notice that you can read the files within, but you can’t write to Mac’s disk. What should you do if you need to write to NTFS files on Mac? Let’s go straight to the methods.
Solutions to fix NTFS read-only issue on Mac
Table of Contents
1. Format your external hard drive to a compatible file system
It’s an excellent solution for the following three conditions. First, the drive is fresh new with nothing on it. Second, even if there are files on the journey, they don’t matter and can be erased without any concern.
Third, there are essential files within the trip, but they are already backed up or restored first. If your hard disk happens to meet the above requirements, you can consider formatting your drive. Here’s how:
- Click on Launchpad at the dock of your Mac, choose Other. Then select Disk Utility to open.
- Select the external hard drive you want to format on the left sidebar.
- Click the Erase on the top of the menu. Then you will see a pop-up that asks for Name, Format, and Scheme for the external hard drive.
We recommend exFAT and FAT32 format for you. These two file systems are compatible with both Windows and Mac operating systems. You can leave the default Scheme GUID unchanged.
As for the Name, it’s totally your choice.
After filling in the information, click on the Erase button to finish. Now you should be able to read and write to the drive on Mac.
2. Use free but complicated NTFS driver for Mac.
If you don’t want to erase your disk, there are some free NTFS drivers for Mac, which guarantee the read-write support on Mac. Mounty for NTFS, NTFS-3G, and FUSE for macOS, just to name a few. However, most of them have inevitable flaws. Let’s take FUSE for macOS, for example.
- The operations and installation are too technical for regular users.
- It could be unstable or unreliable sometimes.
- There’s no technical support when issues occur.
It has to disable SIP (System Integrity Protection), which decreases the security of your Mac. Your Mac will be easier to get attacked by malware or hackers. Therefore, after using FUSE for macOS, you should turn on SIP as soon as possible.
If you are troubled by the inconvenience of free NTFS drivers for Mac, there’s a better choice for you.
3. Commercial but easy-to-use NTFS driver for Mac | NTFS Drives on Mac
Though you have to pay a little money to commercial NTFS drivers for Mac, they can offer high reliability, fast writing speed, excellent compatibility, and free technical support, which you probably won’t get from the free NTFS driver’s Mac as mentioned above.
And among all these paid NTFS drivers available, Microsoft NTFS for Mac by iBoysoft is our top recommendation. It’s very cost-effective and saves you so much trouble.
It enables full read-write access to Microsoft NTFS drives on Mac, including freely creating, saving, copying, pasting, deleting, and modifying files. Also, it has a fast NTFS write and file transferring speed. You no longer have to worry about the NTFS read-only issue. Here are the steps:
Step 1: Free download and install Microsoft NTFS for Mac by iBoysoft on your computer.
Step 2: Connect your NTFS drive to your Mac computer.
Step 3: After your drive is mounted successfully, you can manage your disks and read-write to NTFS drives.
With such secure operations, you can quickly solve the problem. If you don’t use NTFS on Mac, it’s a rather excellent file system for Windows operating system. It has the following advantages.
- The biggest highlight of NTFS is preemptive journaling. It means all journaling is done before any changes are committed to the data.
- NTFS offers different permission instead of shared permission for individual users.
- NTFS employs the compression option for individual files and folders.
- NTFS supports long file and directory names up to 255 characters long.
- NTFS also supports unlimited file size.
4. Conclusion | NTFS Drives on Mac
It’s entirely possible to write to NTFS on Mac, right? You can format the drive to compatible file systems, use free NTFS drivers, or choose the better Microsoft NTFS for Mac by iBoysoft. Hopefully, next time you encounter the NTFS read-only issue, you can have some ideas.
