The NTFS drive will likely not appear on the desktop by default, but you can get access to it in the /Volumes/ directory by opening that folder in the Finder with the following command: Sudo echo 'UUID=ENTER_UUID_HERE none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse' > /etc/fstab With the resulting UUID, use the following command to append the UUID with NTFS read and write support to /etc/fstab: Though it’s slightly more complicated than the drive-name based approach mentioned below, this is really the best method for precision.Ĭonnect the NTFS drive to the Mac, then retrieve the NTFS drives UUID with the following command string:ĭiskutil info /Volumes/DRIVENAME | grep UUID Enable Mac OS X NTFS Write Support Using Drive UUID

So, do the right thing and back up your stuff first.Ĭomfortable with all of that? Great, we’ll cover two different ways to enable NTFS write support in Mac OS X, this must be used on a per-drive basis and it requires the usage of the command line. Accordingly, such a feature may be best as a last resort and should not be used with important data on the Windows drive without having adequate backups of those files. Additionally, the lack of official support suggests there could be the potential for something to go wrong, either in the form of kernel panics or even theoretical data loss on the NTFS drive. Enabling NTFS write support on the Mac is fairly technical and it’s not officially supported by Apple, making it an experimental feature that is best left in the hands of advanced users who understand the process and the potential repercussions.īecause this feature is officially unsupported by Apple, NTFS should not be considered a reliable cross-platform file system for moving files between a Mac and a Windows PC, users will still want to format drives for the FAT file system for optimal Mac to/from PC drive compatibility with full read and write support (perhaps a better solution for many users would be to use samba networking and share files directly through a local network between the PC and Mac in question). Mac OS X has always been able to read NTFS drives, but tucked away in Mac OS X is a hidden option to enable write support to drives formatted as NTFS (NTFS stands for New Technology File System and is a proprietary file system format for Microsoft Windows).

How to format to ntfs on mac