Apple’s macOS can read from Windows-formatted NTFS drives, but can’t write to them out of the box. Here are a few solutions for getting full read/write access to NTFS drives.
This could be useful if you want to write to a Boot Camp partition on your Mac, as Windows system partitions must use the NTFS file system.
However, for external drives, you should probably use exFAT instead. macOS can natively read and write to exFAT drives, just like Windows can.Low on Disk Space? Use CleanMyMac 3 to Clean Your Mac the Easy Way
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Three Options
There are several options for this, and you’ll need to choose one:
- Paid Third-Party Drivers: There are third-party NTFS drivers for Mac that you can install, and they’ll work quite well. These are paid solutions, but they’re easy to install and should offer better performance than the free solutions below.
- Free Third-Party Drivers: There’s a free and open-source NTFS driver you can install on a Mac to enable write support. 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. It’s slower than paid solutions and automatically mounting NTFS partitions in read-write mode is a security risk.
- Apple’s Experimental NTFS-Write Support: The macOS operating system includes experimental support for writing to NTFS drives. However, it’s off by default and requires some messing around in the terminal to enable it. It isn’t guaranteed to work properly and could potentially cause problems with your NTFS file system. In fact, we’ve had it corrupt data before. We really don’t recommend using this. It’s disabled by default for a reason.
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.
The Best Paid Third-Party Driver: Paragon NTFS for Mac
Paragon NTFS for Mac costs $19.95 and offers a ten-day free trial. It’ll install cleanly and easily on modern versions of macOS, including macOS 10.12 Sierra and Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. It really does “just work”, so it’s the best option if you’re willing to pay a small amount of money for this feature.
You also won’t have to fiddle with terminal commands to manually mount partitions, insecurely mount partitions automatically, or deal with potential corruption as you will with the free drivers below. If you need this feature, paying for software that does it properly is worth it. We cannot stress this enough.
If you own a Seagate drive, be aware that Seagate offers a free download of Paragon NTFS for Mac so you won’t have to purchase anything extra.
You could also purchase Tuxera NTFS for Mac, which costs $31 and offers a fourteen-day free trial. But Paragon NTFS does the same thing and is cheaper.
The Best Free Third-Party Drivers: FUSE for macOS
This method is free, but it requires a good bit of work, and is less secure. To make your Mac automatically mount NTFS partitions in read-write mode, you’ll have to temporarily disable System Integrity Protection and replace one of Apple’s built-in tools with a binary that is more vulnerable to attack….
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