Hi, I have a NEW WD My Passport drive. I am not sure if it was only for a PC but It had Mac Discovery app on it to so I thought it would work with a Mac so I did not reformat it in Exfat.
other wise I would have formatted it in exfat for use with PC and Mac.
So this drive is Formatted in NTFS from WD Factory.
I copied files onto it from my Win-10 PC so I know the drive is working correctly.
It actually works really good. Better than I thought.
But Now I want to copy files onto it from my Mac but I think because it is formatted in NTFS
I can not copy from my Mac to the WD.
NTFS is necessary if you want to hook up an external drive to a TV for media playback or have the best compatibility going back and forth from macOS to Windows.
It’s a much better file system for multi-OS use than exFAT.
I personally paid $20 for the Paragon license. It’s great software. There is no better NTFS solution for the Mac.
With this software you can format the drive as NTFS and read as well as write to it. You can only read NTFS drives by default with macOS.
For exclusive Mac use you should use APFS if you’re on High Sierra or newer. Even more so with SSDs internal and external.
Well, most external hard drives are designed to work for Windows computers. Windows was mainly optimized for NTFS (New Technology file system) format, on the other hand, APFS was created for the Mac OS. NTFS is not compatible with Mac and similarly APFS does not get along with Windows. So if you’re trying to connect an external hard drive to a Mac, you might have to format the drive before you can use it.
Further, I suggest you to check the below link that explains all the methods to format your external drive for mac without any data loss:
The default NTFS format of the WD My Passport portable drive grants only “read-only” access on macOS, which is why you cannot copy files from your Mac to the drive. Simply put, any action that alters the drive’s contents counts as a “write” operation. This includes dragging files from your Mac to the drive, creating new folders or documents on it, modifying and saving stored files, renaming files, or moving items to the Trash.
If you want to transfer files from your Mac to this NTFS-formatted drive, you can use one of the following methods:
Method A: Install an NTFS Read/Write Driver
This is the most convenient solution; it enables native NTFS write support on your Mac without requiring you to delete any files or reformat the drive. This tool is particularly useful if your WD drive already contains large amounts of data and you frequently need to transfer files between Windows and Mac systems.
Method B: Use a Computer for Temporary Backup
Step 1: Copy all files from the drive to a Windows PC or Mac for temporary backup.
Step 2: Format the WD portable drive to exFAT (both Windows and macOS have built-in tools for this).
Step 3: Once formatting is complete, copy your files back onto the drive. It will now support full read and write operations on both PCs and Macs.
