This happens because disks formatted as FAT are allocated in clusters depending on their size. Before you change the format of your NTFS files, consider what you have in them.įAT32 isn’t nearly as efficient as NTFS, which can cause data loss for high-quality videos or documents. Your Mac has an app named Disk Utility built into macOS that can help you reformat NTFS files to the FAT32 (file allocation table) format.

Below are a few ways you can work with NTFS on your Mac, both native and third party. Others allow you to work with NTFS for Mac free, but free is not always the best option. Some drivers are paid, and can be quite expensive. Third party drivers and apps are your best bet, and come in several packages. You can change the filetype to something else, but that can be tedious work! You can also tinker with Terminal and allow yourself writing privileges to NTFS, but that's not always advisable. There are a few things you can do with NTFS files on your Mac beyond reading them. NTFS for Mac: How to Work with Windows Drives in macOS You can read them on your Mac, but that's likely not going to suit your needs. When working with NTFS files, you'll need a third party NTFS driver for Mac if you want to work with the files. Many external drives are formatted to NTFS by default, as Windows is more widely used than macOS.īecause it's a proprietary file system Apple hasn't licensed, your Mac can't write to NTFS natively. NTFS stands for NT File System, and was first developed for Windows NT version 3.1, where itw as the default file system for that operating system. In this article, we'll tell you what NTFS is, how you can use it on your Mac, whether there's an NTFS Mac alternative, and discuss the best ways to use the niche filetype on your Mac.

The NTFS format isn't one that's widely discussed, so you may be wondering: 'what is NTFS format, and why would I use it?' Get an ever-growing collection of troubleshooting apps.

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