
If reformatting your NTFS drive for Mac is not an option, you can enable write support for specific Windows disks using macOS Terminal. From now on you’ll be able to move files to your drive and edit them in place from a Mac or PC. Read the warning carefully before proceeding, as this process will delete any existing data on the drive.

Enter a new name for the drive in the field above if you wish.Ĭlick ‘Erase’ to continue. Insert your NTFS drive or USB stick and click to highlight the disk name in the white box on the left-hand side of the window. To get started, click the Spotlight icon at the top right of your screen and enter ‘Disk’ to launch Disk Utility. More information on FAT32 versus NTFS is available from Microsoft Support.

This may pose a problem if you’re using the drive to store high-quality videos. This is simple to do and means the data on your drive/USB stick can be read and written on both Macs and PCs.īe aware that the FAT32 format isn’t as efficient as NTFS: it only supports files sizes of up to 4GB.

You can also buy a program called MacDrive that lets Windows computers read MAC-formatted HFS+ drives.If you have an NTFS drive you can use macOS’ Disk Utility to reformat it to FAT32. See my video called Read and Write NTFS in OS X for more info on that. There is way around that by using the free MacFUSE to help OS X to write to NTFS. NTFS can handle files larger than 4GB, and OS X can read to it, it just can't write to it. But if you're doing large video files, it's not going to work. If you're mainly working with Web pages or audio, that's fine. You cannot create a file larger than 4GB. And then press erase.Īnd press erase again to confirm that you REALLY want to erase it. Under Volume format, choose MS-DOS (FAT) That's FAT32. Remember, you are destroying every last shred of data on this USB drive. Again MAKE SURE you click on the right one. I usually just press Command-Space and type "disk utility" into Spotlight to find it.Ĭlick on the drive you just connected.

Pres OK to affirm you really want to destroy the data on this hard drive.
