You’ll need to disable SIP protection which you then can re-enable again. Once you have Xcode and Homebrew the following will allow you to write to NTFS disks. To start with you are going to need Xcode and some Unix style application packages – and what makes this easy on is Homebrew, a package manager for macOS, follow this guide if you haven’t already got it, it will get you up to speed on both Xcode and Homebrew first, after that come back here and tackle the rest below which involves installing a couple of apps and tweaking a couple of files.įor Xcode you may have an older version you can prompt the updated tools installation with… xcode-select -install This has been tested in macOS Mojave and Sierra. You can write to these disks with a few installs and tweaks in the Terminal, which will make all NTFS drives writeable – there are also some commercial point and click apps that can get the job done if you don’t fancy wading into Terminal commands. To mount your NTFS drive, you’ll need to use Terminal.By default, you can’t write to Windows NTFS USB drives and hard disks on macOS as they appear as read-only on the Desktop.

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.

Can i use ntfs on mac