The best option is to avoid using the NTFS file system since it is a Windows only file system. If you must share a drive between macOS & Windows, then exFAT is the better option since it does not require any third party software. However, Apple made a major rewrite to the FAT/exFAT driver with the release of macOS 14.x Sonoma so there still may be some bugs to work out.
As far as free NTFS driver options......avoid them for now. I recently looked into them for trying to assist another user on this forum and discovered that the traditional recommended drivers for NTFS & FUSE have not been updated for some time, so several people have forked them. However, reading the forums for the newer forked versions, it seems there are some major data destroying bugs with the new free open source NTFS & FUSE drivers. I personally would not trust them at this time until those bugs get ironed out.
As far as reconfiguring macOS to allow Apple's own built-in NTFS driver to handle the NTFS writes.....don't do it if you value your data. There is a very good reason Apple never implemented the write support....it is because Apple has no confidence in the NTFS write support. That should scare people from even thinking about it. If it was safe, then Apple would have enabled write support for NTFS file systems. Think about it.
As @Barney-15E mentions, most consumer external drive manufacturers provide their own proprietary software to allow writing to NTFS file systems. Most of them utilize Paragon's NTFS driver, so if the drive manufacturer doesn't provide an NTFS write support, then users can pay Paragon directly. Some others may also provide a paid third party NTFS driver, but Paragon is the main one which has been around for decades. However, it is up to the user to make sure to keep this third party proprietary software up to date since any small macOS update patch could break it. Major macOS upgrades will almost certainly break the third party driver. Sometimes it can take a while before a third party driver is updated to work with an updated/upgraded OS. Can you live with that possible delay?
If the external drive will only be used with macOS, then the best option is to use either the MacOS Extended (Journaled) or APFS file systems. Which of these two is best depends on two things.
- Whether the external drive is a Hard Drive or an SSD.....HD use MacOS Extended (Journaled), with SSD use APFS
- Or if the drive will be used with older Macs running macOS 10.12 and earlier, then you must use MacOS Extended (Journaled) regardless of the type of drive.
As always, make sure you have a good backup of your external drive if it has important & unique data on it. So many people neglect backups of their computer and even more neglect backing up their external drives.
