How to write to Windows formatted drives in OS X
0If you have owned or used a Apple computer for any length of time, you have probably needed to share files with friends or co-workers who use Windows computers. One one of the easiest ways to do this is through the use of flash or external hard drives.
Standard flash drives use the old FAT32 format for storing information. This is just fine for reasonably small files but each file is limited to a maximum four Gigabytes. When dealing in data such as large HD video files that can become a problem. Because of this limitation most external hard drives come in the NTFS format. This file system was created by Microsoft to replace the old FAT32 standard.
When running OS X this is where you can run into problems. By default OS X can connect to and read a drive formatted in NTFS but unfortunately you can’t write to these drives.
The good news is there is an easy to use application called NTFS for Mac OS X 11, that solves the problem. I’ve been using the software for over a year and have had no problems with it whatsoever. What’s even better is that once the software is installed you never have to think about it again. For me it was well worth the $19.95 license.
I highly recommend giving it a look.