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I have two Mac Minis that I'm using as HTPCs. The Minis have external drives attached to them that have videos and music stored on them. Sometimes I'd like to be able transfer movies to an external drive, but the Minis can't write to my external drive as it's a NTFS partition, so what's the best way to get the Minis to be able to write to the NTFS partition? Thanks for any help.
I am not sure which partition scheme is best for exFAT. I thought that GUID was the best but when recently I formatted a 128 GB flash drive as exFAT (GUID) on macOS 11, the Windows 10 PC saw only 100 MB available. With exFAT (MBR) it saw the whole space.
I have had no trouble with exFAT formatted with Windows 10 default, but some folks have had to adjust the allocation unit sizes in order to get it to work on a Mac (or just format it on the Mac).
You need an app like one of these listed here:
https://iboysoft.com/ntfs-for-mac/free-ntfs-for-mac.html
Just note that in the past some of these apps required updating when for a new Apple macOS version
Thanks for the replies. I looked through the list and all seem to me to have some cons. The iBoysoft wants $75 for one copy, I'd need two and since I'd do this infrequently, that's a bit much for me and I didn't see a Black Friday sale. The others seem to be either slow, not compatible with Monterrey or can potentially corrupt data, I have larger files on them, so I'm not sure fat would work. The HTPCs are 2018 Mac Minis. Thanks again.
Tuxera and Paragon both make NTFS write software for macOS.
Free versions of their software is usually bundled with consumer hard drives, but it fails more often than their paid products. They may actively update the paid versions for OS updates whereas the free versions must be coordinated through the drive manufacturer to get them up to speed.
Can you not just use a Mac file system on the drives? You'll have to transfer data around in order to reformat them, but you won't ever have to worry about the NTFS drivers working.
Thanks Barney. Unfortunately, I can't use an Apple files system as I have a Windows desktop and run Linux on my laptop, so I need to find away to transfer data between them. WiFi would be too slow.
The good news is the external drives I have attached to the Minis and my portable hard drive are all Seagates. It looks like Seagate offers some sort of version of Paragon NTFS driver, though I don't know how to use it at the moment, so I'll have to look into that soon. Thanks again.
> I have larger files on them, so I'm not sure fat would work
AFAIK exFAT the file size limit has increased from the old FAT to 16 exabytes (EB i.e 16 000 000 TB), which is otherwise limited by a maximum volume size of 128 PB (128 000 TB). So there should be no realistic file size or partition size limits.
https://www.howtogeek.com/235596/whats-the-difference-between-fat32-exfat-and-ntfs/
ex-FAT has no limit in file size and is read & write enabled for both Windows and mac.
Does the HTPC support exFAT? It is writeable in macOS (you might have to test which partition scheme (GUID or MBR) and allocation unit size works the best).
Goes to show you what I know. I'll try that and report back. Thanks for the help.
Best Way for a Mac to Write to a NTFS Parition
