Hi, I’ve been using WD Passport ultra 1 TB on Macbook Pro El Capitain. I just purchased a new WD Passport Ultra 2 TB, ran the WD app software that it came with (updated and overwrote the old one). But the 2TB external hardrive does not let me transfer files or create new files. It’s seems to be read only. Everything works fine with my old WD Passport Ultra 1 TB. Can you please help me, I followed all the set up instructions of the new 2 TB drive?
The new drive is formatted in NTFS for Windows out of the box. You need to use Disk Utility and format it for Mac or for Mac and PC.
Great! And thank you so much for the super quick response. Happy holidays!
Your WD Passport Ultra 2 TB should come pre-formatted with NTFS (New Technology File System), which was developed by Microsoft and is primarily used on Windows computers. Due to technical limitations, macOS does not fully support the NTFS format: it can read NTFS drives but cannot natively write to them.
If you want to keep the WD 2 TB drive as is, you can use third-party tools such as iBoysoft NTFS for Mac, Mounty, or other apps that enable macOS to write to NTFS drives. This will allow you to create new files, copy or move files, and modify existing content.
Alternatively, you can reformat the drive to a more universal format like exFAT, which is fully supported on both Mac and Windows computers.
If you only plan to use the drive with Macs, consider formatting it to a Mac-specific format such as APFS or HFS+.
