However, the hard drive is read-only on Mac, which means you can view the files in NTFS hard drive on Mac, but you can’t copy, paste, transfer, edit or even delete files on the NTFS hard drive at all. Sure, it can be recognized by your macOS. There will be some problems when using NTFS hard disk in macOS.Ĭan Mac read NTFS hard drive for free? After connecting an NTFS hard drive with your Mac, you can see it appears in the menu bar for mount or unmount. However, it’s only for Windows, not for macOS. It has gotten great improvement in data transfer speed, stability, and disk space usage compared with the other file systems, like FAT. Microsoft NTFS, short for NT File System, is the default file system for most storage devices used on Windows PC.

We highly recommend paying for a third-party NTFS driver if you need to do this as the other solutions don’t work as well and are more work to set up.Posted to Troubleshooting Tips by William on J| Approved by Jennifer Allen In fact, we’ve had it corrupt data before. It isn’t guaranteed to work properly and could potentially cause problems with your NTFS file system. However, it’s off by default and requires some messing around in the terminal to enable it. Apple’s Experimental NTFS-Write Support: The macOS operating system includes experimental support for writing to NTFS drives.It’s slower than paid solutions and automatically mounting NTFS partitions in read-write mode is a security risk. Unfortunately, this take a bit of extra work to install, especially on Macs with the new System Integrity Protection feature, added in 10.11 El Capitan.

Free Third-Party Drivers: There’s a free and open-source NTFS driver you can install on a Mac to enable write support.

These are paid solutions, but they’re easy to install and should offer better performance than the free solutions below.

Paid Third-Party Drivers: There are third-party NTFS drivers for Mac that you can install, and they’ll work quite well.

There are several options for this, and you’ll need to choose one:

Ntfs on mac software