Also, this usually requires you to launch the Terminal and run a few commands every time you want to mount an external NTFS drive with read/write access enabled. To access the drive, you need to explicitly navigate to the mount point of the drive using the Finder’s “Go to Folder” option. You won’t be able to browse the drive directly within Finder Locations. This means you can mount NTFS drives with read/write access on Mac without any additional software, but there are a few limitations.

NTFS read/write on Mac using Apple Kernel driverĪpple Kernel driver for macOS allows write support on NTFS drives with the “ nobrowse” option. In the below sections, we’ll explore various free as well as paid third-party solutions, along with their benefits and downsides. The ideal solution would be to enable write support by installing suitable NTFS drivers for Mac. Also, the read/write performance of ExFAT is relatively slower compared to NTFS, and it may not be natively compatible with older versions of Windows, Though the first solution is free, it’s not recommended, especially when you need to backup a significant amount of data, as formatting the drive will delete all its contents.

Enable NTFS write support on Mac without formatting the drive.

Reformat the drive in a file system (ExFAT) with write support enabled on both Windows and macOS.

We can fix this read-only access issue primarily in two ways:

MacOS doesn’t have native write support for NTFS, which means, you can only view or open files stored on the drive, but can’t edit, copy, move, or delete them. Have you ever come across the situation where your Mac just won’t let you write to an external drive? Most of the time, this might be because the drive you’re trying to save data to, is formatted as NTFS.

How to mount a ntfs on mac