Maclord's Blog

A file system is the component that allows an OS (operating system) read from and write to files on your devices storage. Every OS has its own file system, some of which are more compatible across platforms than others. For example, Mac computers used exclusively HFS+, while the current versions of Windows uses NTFS (New Technology File System). When you connect a storage device formatted in NTFS to a Mac, it is recognized and read alright, but you can’t modify it by any CRUD operation i.e. Create, Read, Update, Delete any files on it  – unless you have some 3rd party add-ons installed and configured, and you can learn about them in this article to ultimately enable Mac to write onto NTFS drives.

Although the inability to write to NTFS on the Mac might become quite an issue for Mac newbies, be them first-time computer users or switchers from PC, the solution which is was invented as early 2000s, has evolved over the years as macOS (X) has been updated. The Mac operating system formerly called OS X – last year renamed macOS – can always read & write to PC disks and hard drive volumes formatted in FAT32 – a format which is not quite used any more due to its limitations of 4 GB maximum file size and 2 TB for maximum storage volume, whereas NTFS, free of these limitations, is readable not just by Macs since day 1, but by almost all non Windows-PC systems as well. However NTFS is not writable by default outside Windows due to a restriction brought on by Microsoft. As mentioned, there already are a few 3rd party solutions and workarounds to remove this restriction.

With the release of macOS High Sierra which introduced Apple’s new file system called APFS to be used by newer SSD-based Macs replacing the legacy HFS+, bringing on the ability to write to NTFS formatted volumes has become a little more complicated. Since my article titled Ability to write to NTFS volumes on the Mac published back in 2008 has become fairly obsolete so that the suggested workaround(s) in it are now very difficult if not impossible to apply, in this new, 2018 article, I’ll be explaining some of the best solutions for the need to write to PC volumes a.k.a. NTFS drives as an assertive old-timer. I’ve been using Apple computers since 1985 and have been doing computing cross-platform computing since 1993, and have been using Bootcamp since the year it came out and cross-platform working is at the heart of most of my digital activity.

Read on to find out about free and paid solutions to be able to write to NTFS disks and other storage devices mounted on the Mac.[Read more]