i have a wd external hard drive formatted in ntfs and am now buying my 1st mb air. if i buy a new mac approved hard drive and copy all my old files to the new hard drive using my pc, will i be able to both read and write on my new mac book? what if i used the mac book to copy the 2 hard drives to take advantage of the faster usb 3's would that still work?
thanks in advance for all your help
OS X cannot natively write to NTFS, but it can read.
Windows can neither read nor write to HFS+, natively.
Both can read/write FAT32, exFAT.
You can purchase third-party software for both Windows and OS X that will allow reading/writing the opposite filesystem formats.
Paragon and Tuxera make the OS X software. The only Windows software I know of is called MacDrive.
All* hard drives are “Mac approved,” they just might not be formatted for a Mac, or they come bundled with useless software that only runs on Windows.
*I’m sure you might be able to find one you can never make work on a Mac, but it generally doesn’t matter what is printed on the carton.
so what do you suggest I do? I have 600 gbs of media on my hard drive that I obviously still want. What's the best way to bring them over? If I buy a new hard drive and plug them both into my new Mac, will that allow me to copy the files and have full access to them on the new external drive?
Yes, you could do that. Just format the new drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) (see below).
You could also just plug in the drive to the Mac and you could read the drive without issue. You wouldn’t be able to make any changes to the files, but you could copy them to another location.
You could install one of the NTFS helpers I mentioned above and be able to both Read and Write to the NTFS drive as is.
Here is how to format the drive for Mac-only use:
thanks for the quick reply. So to be clear, if I just buy a new seagate external that's formatted specifically for macs and plug both my new and old hard drives into a new MacBook Air, i should be able to copy everything from the wd hard drive (that's in Ntfs), paste if to the new seagate and then use it fully (ie both read and write files)? Thanks again for your help, I spent 45 minutes in an apple store today and no one there seemed to be able to assist me.
Yes, but I'd check the format on the drive and reformat if needed. It may not be HFS + Even if listed for Macs.
With a new drive, would you recommend formatting to hfs+ or using fat32 or exfat?
If you need to use it on Windows also, then you should use one of the FAT formats.
If not, I would use the Mac format.
Cool, thanks again for all your help, I'll go buy everything tomorrow ame hopefully this will all work - cant believe I couldn't get these answera at the apple store
Barney-15E wrote:
OS X cannot natively write to NTFS, but it can read.
Windows can neither read nor write to HFS+, natively.
Both can read/write FAT32, exFAT.
You can purchase third-party software for both Windows and OS X that will allow reading/writing the opposite filesystem formats.
Paragon and Tuxera make the OS X software. The only Windows software I know of is called MacDrive.
MacDrive is not the only way, Paragon HFS is available and preferable..
Macs can as standard read the following formats
HFS+
FAT16
FAT32
exFAT
NTFS
and Macs can as standard write to all of those except NTFS
Windows can read
FAT16
FAT32
exFAT
NTFS
and Windows can write to all of those.
There is software for Windows to let it read and write to HFS+ but in general you have to buy this. There is software for Mac to let it write to NTFS but in general you have to buy this.
In your case if your looking for a format for an external drive to share between Mac and Windows the best option is to use exFAT as both operating systems fully support this format and this format has no size limitations unlike FAT32. The only issue with exFAT is that it cannot be used as a boot drive but it sounds like that is not what you want anyway.
copying an ntfs hard drive
