It may be designed for cross-platform use with Windows-formatted storage, but Paragon NTFS for Mac features a Mojave-friendly user interface designed for Apple fans. Not only does Paragon’s proprietary driver enable writing to NTFS-formatted volumes, it does so up to six times faster than the competition – typically as fast (or faster) than the Mac’s native HFS+ file system.

That’s why I’ve happily installed NTFS for Mac over the years. Open-source drivers like FUSE make the process easier and more reliable, but slow data transfer speeds make it not worth the trouble. But Apple has never officially supported this functionality, and with good reason: it’s glacially slow at best, completely flaky at worst. Unbeknownst to many Mac owners, NTFS write support natively exists deep inside Mac OS X (as well as macOS), requiring a few Terminal commands to enable. Buy a new hard drive, and you’ll probably find that media comes preformatted as NTFS (New Technology File System)-which isn’t a huge problem unless you need to write data to that volume. Likewise, Microsoft’s newer exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table) works equally well on macOS, with maximum file sizes that exceed that of even the most capacious hard drives.įor whatever reason, Apple has chosen to handicap perhaps the most common file system in use today on Windows PCs. Insert a thumb drive formatted with Microsoft’s venerable FAT (File Allocation Table) file system into your Mac’s USB port, and you’ll have no problem reading or writing data to that volume, as long as those files are under 4GB in size.

Paragon ntfs for mac lion