Changed To A Mac & Can’t Write To My External Harddrive! Now What?

I am a recent PC to Mac convert and have ran into a few roadblocks which has required me to conduct a little more research. My biggest issue was with an external harddrive, which I use along with my computer to act as a storage unit. My external harddrive houses approximately 300GB of music and videos.

When plugging my external harddrive into my new Mac, I noticed it could read my files, but I couldn’t write or add any new files to my external harddrive.

Problem

I’ve been using the external harddrive with Windows and it is formatted with NTFS.

Solution

After doing some research online, I found the free tool MacFUSE, which allows you to use any File-system in Userspace on Mac (FUSE). Just click on the “Download” tab.

Now that I had this capability, I needed to grab a tool to allow me to read and write my NTFS formatted external harddrive. The best tool I found was Tuxera’s NTFS for Mac. It’s a little pricey at $35.61, but offers a free 15 day trial so you can try it out.

After installing both tools, I opened up my external harddrive and was able to start adding new files with out any additional work.