Installing NTFS-3G on my MacBook Air

If the aim is to install ntfs-3g on mac. Here's what I found

brew tap gromgit/homebrew-fuse
brew install ntfs-3g-mac

source: https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/wiki/NTFS-3G

It would be much easier to reformat the drive as ExFAT. Then both the Mac and Windows can read/write the drive without the need for any special drivers on either platform.

If you already have data on the NTFS drive, make sure to first copy it off to another drive. Then reformat the drive and copy the data back.

Seems like it needs a lot more than simple dependencies since it tell you Linux is required. ntfs-3g apparently is not intended to be used on macOS.

As @Kurt Lang suggested, I also recommend using exFAT for any drives which need to be shared with Windows' systems, but I have also seen a lot of users reporting on this forum that they are having issues with macOS 14.x Sonoma and exFAT (even FAT32) volumes. Apparently Apple changed the exFAT (and FAT aka ms-dos) driver from a Kernel based driver to a user space file system so significant portions of the code were rewritten, if not everything, so it is not surprising for there to be issues. Some people are experiencing issues while others are not, unfortunately it is not clear why which is not unusual on this forum since people tend to omit important details.

If you want to write to NTFS volumes using macOS, then you should look into the paid third party NTFS drivers such as the ones from Paragon, or Tuxera. If you only need to read files from an NTFS volume, then there is no reason for installing any third party drivers since macOS can read from NTFS volumes by default.

If you do not need to share the drive with Windows, then it would be best to format the drive as either MacOS Extended (Journaled), or APFS....personally I would opt for the former since it has been around longer and is compatible with more versions of macOS especially if you have older Macs.

Kurt Lang wrote:

Apparently Apple changed the exFAT (and FAT aka ms-dos) driver from a Kernel based driver to a user space file system so significant portions of the code were rewritten, if not everything, so it is not surprising for there to be issues.

@ HWTech,

That I did not know about.

It might then safer in the long run for suprateek13 to redo the copy/erase/copy sequence on a Windows computer so Windows is creating the ExFAT system.

What do you think? Or would macOS then have an issue with the drive?

Hard to say, but in the past it seemed to be best to create the exFAT file system on macOS because macOS was more limited on or picky about the file allocation sizes used. I had seen a few reports online (not on this forum) where a macOS exFAT formatted drive had issues on Windows, but again not enough information or details about those cases. I would say it would still be best to format an exFAT volume using macOS though since I would think Windows would be able to handle any issues better than macOS.

Here is the Apple article with the information about the change in the exFAT/FAT (ms-dos) driver:

macOS Sonoma 14 Release Notes | Apple Developer Documentation

Here is a screenshot of relevant section (search "exfat"):

Besides some people having issues using exFAT in general, a few people noticed they cannot customize the volume icon for an exFAT or FAT volume now. So far I've only seen a handful of people post on this forum about each issue so it is hard to say why some people are encountering issues and others are not.

Apparently Apple changed the exFAT (and FAT aka ms-dos) driver from a Kernel based driver to a user space file system so significant portions of the code were rewritten, if not everything, so it is not surprising for there to be issues.

@ HWTech,

That I did not know about.

It might then safer in the long run for suprateek13 to redo the copy/erase/copy sequence on a Windows computer so Windows is creating the ExFAT system.

What do you think? Or would macOS then have an issue with the drive?

Do you recommend MBR or GUID for exFAT?

A while back I used GUID to reformat a 128 GB flash drive exFAT on BigSur (?). On the Mac it was OK but the Windows 10 PC at work saw only a tiny volume (AFAIR 20-30 GB?). Reformatting it exFAT MBR on the Mac fixed that on the Windows side.

I thought that GUID was "better" but maybe not in this purpose?