NTFS on Mac

Using NTFS on macOS is still a pain. It at least mounts volumes as read-only by default, which is better than nothing, but if you want to write to the disk it’s not as straightforward.

Tuxera and Paragon both have commercial solutions, but I’d rather just use something janky and unsupported, because I’m me. The only reason I even want to write to an NTFS volume on macOS is because my TV only supports playback from FAT32 and NTFS filesystems, and FAT32’s 4 GB limit is not ideal for modern media resolutions, even with newer codecs like AV1.

Let’s just use random Homebrew packages and accept the potential for data loss.

brew install --cask macfuse mounty

brew tap gromgit/homebrew-fuse
brew install gromgit/fuse/ntfs-3g-mac

Simple enough, my TV can play back media written with this setup, and that’s all I really wanted. MacFUSE lets us use the ntfs-3g FUSE driver (which is not intended for macOS, and is very unsupported). The Mounty app wraps the driver in a nice GUI that can auto-remount NTFS volumes r/w, and it’s not a terrible UX overall once it’s working.

April update: After a macOS reinstall, I decided to see if the commercial options were notably different/better. I’m using the latest Tuxera NTFS for Mac now, and it’s… fine. The initial setup was quite similar, still requiring manually enabling user kernel extension management from Recovery, and the UX once configured is very similar to what Mounty does for free. I’m sure there are advantages to the commercially-supported, actually-maintained NTFS driver compared to a very-unsupported Linux FUSE port, but so far I’m not seeing a significant difference in usability under normal conditions.