Friday, February 14, 2014

Seagate External HDD NTFS Driver for Mac

Updated simplified post here.
There is very limited support for Reading and Writing to NTFS file format on Mac. Since most of the External Hard Drives (Seagate 1TB External HDD in my case) come with default format of NTFS, it is a pain to reformat it to universally compatible (Ex-Fat) format and sometimes you reluctantly avoid it.

Strangely, when I plugged in my Seagate drive to Mac, it was able to detect it and read and write effortlessly. But after a few days, it showed it could only read the drive and not write to it. It was very strange and I started to look for options since I was planning to use this drive as Backup and was intending to write heavily to it.

Mac OS X has limited support for writing to NTFS file format, but because of limited support this feature is hidden. I found a script which used this feature to enable you to write to your disk, but this had its own limitation.

Using this script I was able to write to my drive but soon I found it corrupted my files and made them inaccessible. Frustrated I resolved to Google search a solution again till I stumbled across Seagate site. They have a NTFS support for Mac through Paragon driver which typically you have to pay for but is FREE for Seagate customers. Installation was seamless and after I restart, I was able to use my drive smoothly without any further glitches. Hopefully this post should help people going through similar experience.

Cheers.
PS - (From Appy's comment below) Check if your HDD came with preloaded NTFS for Mac driver

1 comment:

  1. Hey Amir,

    Thanks for your post. I have just bought the 1tb Samsung M3 (which is actually a seagate disc) which I am planning to use to backup all data from my Mac as I slowly transition back to Windows.
    The Drive came with a preloaded NTFS for mac 9.5 file which I thought of installing but then I saw your post. Would you recommend using the link provided on ur article or the pre loaded one?
    More importantly would you recommend using this instead of using the Disk Utility and converting the HDD to a FAT32 system so that in can be read by both

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