Paragon is a tried and trusted solution with over a million downloads from Mac users and it has some of the fastest drivers on the market. You’ll also get a few options for reformatting and more via a new pane that’s automatically added to System Preferences.
If you want to write to an NTFS drive natively like any other drive on your Mac, there is fortunately a way to easily add that functionality using Paragon NTFS for Mac.Īfter you’ve installed Paragon NTFS for Mac, you’ll be able to access and write to NTFS drives with full compatibility, allowing you to transfer data to the Windows-formatted disks by dragging and dropping files to it in the Finder. You’ll be able to read what’s on the drive, but to have full compatibility to access and edit what’s on it requires a workaround. If you want to write to/edit an NTFS formatted drive on macOS, a format commonly used for drives that interface with Windows computers, there’s a couple ways of doing it.
The process of formatting a drive to be compatible with Windows PC and Mac OS X requires a different format choice, but is otherwise quite similar.Have you come across an NTFS formatted drive you’re having trouble using on your Mac? It’s not just an issue for those switching from Windows machines to Mac, but also for Bootcamp users and others who want to connect the odd drive from their Windows-using friends or colleagues. Should you intend to make an Mac OS installer drive (for OS X Mavericks, OS X El Capitan, OS X Yosemite, etc) or create any other bootable Mac OS X volume from a drive, or use a new drive as a fully compatible Time Machine backup drive, you will also need to complete this process. Similarly, you can perform the same type of process in Mac OS X for making a USB flash drive compatible with Mac OS using the Disk Utility in Mac OS X, as you can see, it’s a quick procedure that is done in short order on any Mac: The videos below demonstrate the complete process of formatting an external hard drive for full Mac OS X compatibility, this uses the new Disk Utility in modern versions of Mac OS X:
When completed, the drive will be formatted to the Mac OS X compatible HFS+ filesystem. Smaller external hard drives, SSD’s, and USB flash keys format quickly, while a larger hard drive may take a while longer. That’s all there is to it, the drive will now format and erase everything on it.
How to Format an External Drive for Mac Compatibility If you have never formatted a drive before on the Mac, don’t worry, it’s super easy and we’ll walk you through the entire process.