Why? To be honest, this feature is experimental and may cause data loss on both your Mac and the NTFS drive. That's because formatting a drive will erase all data on it, which can cause data loss.Īnd for the way to use Terminal, it is not recommended either. In fact, it is not advisable to format the NTFS drive to FAT32, exFAT, or APFS. Or, some developers named it NTFS Mounter for Mac, NTFS File Explorer for Mac, Disk Mounter for Mac, or similar.īut some of you may say that there are other ways to make the NTFS drives read and write on Mac, including formatting the NTFS drive to a macOS-compatible file system (FAT32, exFAT, or APFS) and running commands in Terminal.

Therefore, a special third-party tool comes out to enable you to read and write NTFS drives on Mac just as on a Windows computer. In other words, you can't write to NTFS formatted drives on Mac, such as moving files onto and deleting and editing files stored in the NTFS drives. NTFS for Mac is a third-party app that is designed to make NTFS drives fully read-write on Mac.īy default, NTFS is read-only on Mac. All in all, Mac can recognize and read NTFS drives but is unable to write to them. In macOS, you are only allowed to open and read the NTFS drives, format NTFS drives to a macOS-compatible file system, and move files from the NTFS drives to your Mac. While for the competitor of Microsoft - Apple, it doesn't have the complete right to use NTFS. You are allowed to read and write to NTFS on a Windows computer without limitation. What is NTFS for Mac and do you need it?Ĭreated and developed by Microsoft, NTFS (short for New Technology File System) is a default file system for Windows. This article is here to give you a detailed overview of NTFS for Mac, answering you what is NTFS for Mac, is NTFS for Mac safe, and do you really need it to help you use NTFS drives on Mac. If you have no idea about NTFS for Mac, you can follow this post. So, the necessary utility - NTFS for Mac is developed and released. macOS can only detect the NTFS drive and mount it in read mode.

The answer is that Apple doesn't have the fully read-write proprietary for NTFS. So, you may wonder 'Does Mac detect NTFS?', 'Can macOS read NTFS?', 'Is NTFS compatible with Mac?'. But now, you need to use your NTFS drive on Mac for file transferring or editing. As you know, NTFS is compatible with Windows.

Enable write to ntfs on mac