Enable NTFS Read/Write Support OS X

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September 29 2009 by Scott in Technology

I recently purchased a 500GB external USB harddrive for data back-ups and file transfers between my iMac, PC’s, Laptop and Server. As all these systems run different operating systems I had to think about the formatting of the external drive. The PC’s are Windows based machines, the server is Linux, and then there’s the OS X iMac. I know FAT32 would be able to have read/write support on all of the operating systems I use, but FAT32 also has a 4GB storage limit!

I finally settled on NTFS mainly because all my systems can read/write to NTFS as standard, all except my iMac. The release of Snow Leopard was supposed to give OS X full write support to NTFS formatted volumes, but, for whatever reason Apple decided not to implement it in the final release.

This does not mean it’s not possible! All that’s needed is a few tweaks.

Okay, firstly once you have plugged in your device and it has mounted on the Desktop, look at the name underneath the icon as this is what we’ll need later on. Next, open up a Terminal window, Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities > Terminal.app

Once open you need to type the next command into your Terminal:

This will open up your default fstab in an editor. The default fstab on OS X will be blank. Once open you now to add an entry for your NTFS device (this is where we need the name from earlier). You need to add the following code into your fstab that is open in Terminal:

That’s it! Press CTRL+, Y, Return to save and exit.

All that’s left to do is a quick reboot and the next time you plug in your NTFS formatted device you should now have full read/write access.