How to Enable NTFS Read Write Support on Hardrive in Mac OS X

Free NTFS read and write solutions in Mac OS X El Capitan or older OS X version

Mac OS does not support both reading and writing on NTFS Flash Drive by default. Look at the following tutorial to enable NTFS read/write support in Mac OS X El Capitan, Yosemite or older OS X versions.

No matter which OS using (OS X El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks or older OS X versions), it comes to pretty quick and easy solutions to mount, read and write NTFS Partitions on Mac. The below 2 methods will make it doable (the solution 2 is complicated by using Terminal, but 100% works well).

1 – Use NTFS support softwares

There are some Free NTFS Softwares for Mac. However, Free NTFS drivers have significant weaknesses:

• Limitation to maximum file/partition size
• Low compatibility and may not support OS X 10.11 El Capitan Fully & other software such as Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion
• Do not work in 64-bit kernel modes
• The read/write speed to NTFS partition is not optimized and similar to native HFS+
• Unable to create, verify and repair NTFS partitions under Mac® OS X
• Do not improve transfer rates for read/write operations on SSDs

At for paid Mac NTFS softwares, there are just only two brands in town.

• Tuxera NTFS 2015 now support OS X 10.11 El Capitan fully. However it costs too much money like steal for the license.
• Paragon NTFS 14 works perfectly in OS X versions (Mavericks, Yosemite and El Capitan).

Both above paid softwares are great. However, we suppose Paragon NTFS 14 is the much better choice since it comes with cheaper cost, works more effectively than Tuxera 2015, and especially offers 30-day-money back to guarantee for the quality.

2 – Use Terminal to enable NTFS support on Hardrive in El Capitan

This solution works 100% in OS X Capitan:

We do not talk about why Mac OS X does not support full NTFS itself or why This feature is hidden from Mac OS X. We absolutely can use Terminal command to manually Enable NTFS write support. Let’s see how it works.

• To run Terminal: Applications > Utilities > Terminal
• Type: sudo nano /etc/fstab
• Fill your user password
• You now are brought to a program called nano and it’s the text editor that’s built into Terminal. The file that you’ll edit is called stab.
• Within nano type:

  LABEL=DRIVE_NAME none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse

Notice: DRIVE_NAME is the name of the drive. The drive’s name should contain no spaces, as adding a space to the configuration file would tell your Mac to interpret whatever’s after that space as a separate command. If your DRIVE_NAME is made up of two words separated with a space, for example, “NO NAME”, you have to add a “\” before the space for the system to recognize the space. For example, “NO\ NAME”.

• Finally, you just Control-O to save the file and Control-X to exit nano. See the result:

Be noticed that Instead of using Driver LABEL, after sudo nano /etc/fstab, we can use the following command line

UUID=Universal Unique Identifier none ntfs rw

Universal Unique Identifier can be determined by Disk Utility.