I’ve been using Mounty for Mac to read and write NTFS drives on Mac since I switched from Windows to macOS. It’s a great free tool that served me well, but recently, I came across iBoysoft NTFS for Mac, and it has brought a new level of convenience to my NTFS drive management on macOS.
Unlike Mounty for Mac, iBoysoft NTFS for Mac offers additional features and a more seamless experience. It integrates smoothly into the Mac environment, allowing for hassle-free read-write access to NTFS drives on Mac. Plus, the option to erase non-NTFS drives to NTFS is a real plus, which makes up for the inability to directly format other disks into NTFS in Disk Utility.
Being in a mixed OS environment, with both Mac and Windows operating systems, iBoysoft NTFS for Mac is really a time-saver, as it saves the hassle of constantly reformatting drives or dealing with compatibility issues.
Anyway, both NTFS for Mac solutions are reliable, and I’ve never encountered data loss or corruption issues with them. Have you tried both programs out, or do you have any experiences to share about managing NTFS drives on your Mac? Let’s discuss and learn from each other!
I’ve had good luck with Tuxera NTFS for Mac. It has a kernel extension that requires Reduced Security on Apple Silicon and approval in Security preference pane on Intel.
exFAT is best for flash drives that don’t have a dedicated controller. exFAT doesn’t have journaling (which writes to a file system log first before writing to the device). That means there is less work for the flash drive to manage, but the file system is less durable to failure.
NTFS is best for hard drives or SSDs, both of which have dedicated controllers to handle the extra load.
NTFS journaling is why you don’t have to rebuild Windows when the power goes out when Windows is running.
HFS+ and APFS both have journaling.
Even after five years on this power user forum I still occasionally forget I may be talking to a very experienced computer user. Unlike many I used to deal with that would have had a better chance of successfully performing an appendectomy than installing a drive utility.
Despite any limitations of the format, exFAT has solved many problems for me over the years. For example, I could hand a drive to someone without worrying if they were going to connect it to a Mac, a PC, or Nvidia Shield. Thanks to the cloud, sneaker-net is rarely needed these days but I still keep an unencrypted exFAT drive that can be used by my executor regardless of his choice of computer.
I have used these tools for years. covers NTFS, ExtFS, etc. Particularly effective if you want to access the files on your Boot Camp partition without booting into Windows. They also have Camptune that allows you resize your Boot Camp partition whenever you need to… though there are not many of us left that do that.
Sharing is an excellent use case for exFAT. I was thinking about your own data.
Thanks for the compliment. It’s always the next client’s job that can crash my confidence (for a short while (and the down time is getting shorter the longer I’m working)) and I never know when that’s going to happen.
