
Choose Disk Utility among these utilities and open it. Click on Launchpad at the dock of your Mac and choose Other in the menu. Simply, you can check this by viewing its disk information either in Disk Utility or in the Finder, and here is how. How do I know if my external hard drive is NTFS file system? Therefore, if you find your external hard drive read-only, the first thing that comes to your mind should be to check if this drive is NTFS file system. If you try to copy or drag files to an NTFS-formatted external hard drive on Mac, you'll be unable to but see the greyed-out no symbol as below.Īnd when you open files on this external hard drive, you will find your documents being read-only. That's to say, you are unable to write to NTFS drive on Mac. FAT32 and exFAT are usable for both Windows and Mac operating systems. There are many different kinds of file systems, and each one has different structure and logic, properties of speed, flexibility, security, size, etc.īy default, Windows uses Microsoft NTFS file system while Mac uses HFS+ and APFS for OS volume.

Then, you can find a relevant and feasible solution to fix Mac external hard drive read-only issue without formatting. This post will analyze the three external hard drive read-only cases. For example, many people have reported that their WD My Passport read-only on Mac and don't know how to unlock Seagate external hard drive read-only on Mac. Usually, you can read and write to files on an external hard drive on your Mac, but there are chances that this external hard drive shows read-only on Mac.
