Though user experience is better with Hasleo NTFS, its performance is significantly slower compared to native write speeds. The drives can easily be mounted or unmounted from its menu bar icon or accessed directly within Finder Locations. There’s another notable free utility to enable write support to external USB drives, called Hasleo NTFS for Mac, which provides a more native-like browsing experience. for NTFS drives, as it uses the Apple Kernel driver with “nobrowse” option, instead of its own dedicated driver. In our tests, Mounty’s NTFS write performance is almost on par with most of the paid NTFS solutions, but it lacks native features like Finder Integration, dedicated data protection mechanism, disk management, etc. If you need to open any file on the drive from other apps, you’d need to unmount and remount it as read-only. Note: When the drive is mounted as read/write using Mounty, you can’t locate it in Finder Locations hence, you can’t browse the files on the drive through other apps. The drive will be unmounted and you can safely unplug the drive. When you’re done writing to the drive, go back to the Mounty for Mac icon on the menu bar and choose “unmount”. You can copy, move, create, or delete files on the drive.Īs long as the drive is mounted via Mounty, you can easily access the drive by clicking on the “ Show in Finder” option.

A new Finder window opens with the external NTFS drive mounted in read/write mode.

The NTFS drive should be detected and listed in the app menu. If you have dismissed the notification, you can still re-mount it from the Mounty menu bar icon.

Mounty should automatically detect and prompt you to re-mount the drive with read/write access via a notification.

Optionally, you may enable the option to “Start at Login”. Launch the app and ensure it is running from the menu bar.It sits on the Mac menu bar and provides easy access to mount & unmount NTFS volumes as read/write. Mounty is a popular Mac utility that allows you to mount NTFS external drives as writable volumes. How to write to NTFS drives on Mac for free These usually mount your drive as read/write on Mac, and open a Finder window to the mount point of the drive, allowing you to access its contents. Though it’s just two commands, it can become tedious over time, even for those who are comfortable with the Terminal.įortunately, there are a few free utilities available, which can automate the same process, but in a more convenient fashion. 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.

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