The cause of the 'Read Only' behavior is due to the format of the file system. While this file system is readable on Macs because OS X can rearrange the data as it is reading it, the way that NTFS writes the files to the storage device is not hence, you can read, but not write. The NTFS file system is a system specifically optimized for Windows in the way that it organizes the data on the drive. If you look in the general twirl-down under format you can see that this drive is formatted in the windows NT file system. The cause of this is due to the filing system the storage device is formatted in. Looking in the info window you can see that the permissions for the drive only allow for reading. If you right click the drive and select Get Info, you can see at the bottom of the info window under the sharing and permissions twirl down, you only have permission to read from this drive and nothing else. Trying to copy a file to my USB drive gives an icon indicating that you cannot copy files to the volume. Something is obviously not right with the storage drive. If I try to delete a file, by pressing Command+Delete, nothing happens and, if I right click the file, the option to move it to the trash can is missing. But if I attempt to copy a file to the drive on my Mac, I get an icon telling me that I am not able to copy the file. I am able to open the drive and can even copy files from the drive. I have a USB drive that I purchased and use with various PCs at work and school. Quick Tip: Solving “Read Only” External Drive Problems on Your Mac Tuxera (who develop one of the commercial NTFS drivers for Mac OS X) have a list of free NTFS drivers that are developed from the same NTFS-3G source used by Linux to read NTFS drives.Quick Tip: Solving 'Read Only' External Drive Problems on Your Mac For a while I've been using but as far as I can tell it hasn't been updated since December 2008.

I'd love for someone to tell me differently. There are a few third-party products that allow Mac OS X to read NTFS formatted drives but as far as I'm aware the free ones aren't as well maintained as the commercial ones. Mac OS X has had support for reading NTFS formatted disk for a few versions, but still doesn't have write support. The default GUID partitioning scheme won't be recognised by 32-bit Windows XP and earlier Windows operating systems and Mac OS X versions earlier than 10.4.

FAT32 (called MS-DOS (FAT) by Disk Utility a filesystem originally released in 1977 and updated a few times since, lastly in 1996) really is the only cross platform filesystem that is going to work fully out of the box with Windows and Mac OS X.īe careful though, if you are using Disk Utility to format the drive, you should make sure to choose the Master Boot Record partitioning scheme (hit the 'Options.' button below the 'Partition Layout' control on the Partition pane).

Usb drive that works with mac and pc