In summary: macOS can read and write to FAT32 drives with no additional software, but single files are limited to 4 GB. While macOS can read NTFS drives without additional configuration, the operating system needs additional software to write to NTFS drives. This file system does not suffer the same limitations as FAT32, but macOS cannot write to NTFS drives natively. Today, most Windows hard drives are formatted with NTFS. As hard drive capacity has increase, FAT32’s popularity has decreased. FAT32 also cannot format drives larger than 2 TB without a little convincing. You can write more than 4 gigs of data to the drive, but you cannot transfer a single file that is larger than 4 gigabytes to a FAT32-formatted drive. The only limitation is that it cannot transfer single files over 4 gigabytes. Fortunately, macOS can read and write to FAT32 drives with no additional software or setup. Windows uses NTFS in most cases, but sometimes drives are formatted as FAT32 as well. The stumbling block in simple cross-compatibility between macOS and Windows is the file system. If you have a hard drive from Windows that you need to access on macOS, follow one of the routes below for accessing the file. But working with Windows hard drives still requires some setup and thought. There was a time when there was virtually no cross-compatibility between the operating systems, and files edited in Windows basically could not be transferred to the Mac.

It’s much easier now than it use to be, of course.

To mount your NTFS drive, you’ll need to use Terminal.Interacting with Windows from macOS has always been a pain. So NTFS-3G is forced to write “live,” which degrades performance significantly. This happens because macOS does not have a buffer for writing to NTFS drives, nor the virtual memory to hold that buffer. Compared to the 500+ MB/s achieved by an SSD, the difference is dramatic. Transfer performance is slow, often limited to about 10 MB/s. You can download the package directly from the Tuxera website, from GitHub, or with Homebrew. With this Terminal command you can mount drives in macOS in a writable state. NTFS-3G is an open-source command-line program for writing to NTFS drives in macOS. Write support for NTFS drives can be added through open-source programs, paid programs, or Apple’s own experimental drivers. Your Mac can read NTFS drives, transferring content from the drives to another place, but it cannot write to NTFS drives.

Read and write ntfs on mac