Tuxera NTFS 2023.1 for macOS

NTFS drives mount read-only in macOS by default, which stops you from adding or changing files on them. Tuxera NTFS lifts that limit.

NTFS driver for Mac — A piece of software that teaches macOS how to talk to Windows-formatted drives with full permissions.

Full read and write — Open, edit, copy, move, and delete files on NTFS USB sticks and external disks right from the Finder.

NTFS formatting — Create new NTFS volumes and disk images without leaving your Mac, useful when setting up a drive for a Windows machine.

Virtual machine support — Works with files when Windows runs inside a VM, so shared folders behave the way you expect.

Version 2023.1 is a maintenance release that keeps the core engine steady. The big fix corrects a timestamp bug—files copied to NTFS volumes now carry the right date and time. Everything else that made the driver a go-to choice, like support for every NTFS version and a light footprint, carries forward unchanged.

Desktop mount in two seconds

I expected a driver to be invisible, and for the most part it is. Plug in a Windows-formatted external SSD, wait about two seconds, and it appears on the desktop like any Mac-formatted drive. Drag a 4 GB video file onto it and the progress bar moves at the same clip as a native HFS+ copy. I ran a rough unscientific test moving a folder of three hundred RAW photos back and forth a few times—no hiccups, no beachballs, no Finder freezes. Memory use sits around 15 MB in the background, which is a rounding error on any Mac from the last decade.

Stability is what you buy a driver for. Tuxera caches writes sensibly, so yanking a drive without ejecting it still risks corruption—no driver can fully protect you from that—but the file system repair tool pulled a garbled directory back into shape when I did it on purpose. The driver hasn't kernel-panicked a machine in my house, and I've run it on everything from an old iMac on Sierra to an M1 MacBook Air.

Timestamps now survive a copy

One small pain point vanished: timestamp accuracy. Earlier builds sometimes stamped newly copied files with the moment they landed on the NTFS volume instead of the original creation or modification date. For a photographer sorting by date or someone backing up project folders, that was maddening. Version 2023.1 corrects it, and the fix works for both single files and batch copies. No new features, no interface changes—just a cleanup under the hood that makes file metadata behave.

Mount as read-only? Clean-unmount first

A few things trip people up, and they're usually not the driver's fault.

• Drive still read-only after installing. This almost always means the volume wasn't cleanly unmounted from Windows. Boot into Windows, run chkdsk on the drive, and shut down properly—not a fast shutdown, which leaves the file system in a hibernated state. Plug it back into the Mac and Tuxera will mount it with write access.
• Disk Utility doesn't show NTFS as a format option. Tuxera adds NTFS support at the system level, but Disk Utility doesn't adopt third-party format choices. Use Tuxera's own Disk Manager tool to create NTFS volumes, or format the drive in Windows first.
• Slow write speeds on USB flash drives. Cheap thumb drives with tiny write caches choke regardless of the file system. Test the same drive on a PC—if it's slow there too, the hardware is the bottleneck. A decent external SSD should saturate USB 3.0 speeds on both reads and writes.
• Permissions prompts on files copied from a PC. NTFS carries Windows ownership data. The Mac ignores it for read/write purposes, but you might see a lock icon or a permissions dialog. Running Get Info and applying permissions to enclosed items usually clears it in a few clicks.

Disk Manager sits in System Settings

Tuxera's installer places a preference pane in System Settings (or System Preferences, depending on your macOS version). Most people never open it, and that's fine—the defaults work. But a couple of switches are worth a look.

The Disk Manager utility lives in your Applications folder and gives you a straightforward window for formatting and repairing NTFS volumes. It's quicker than booting Windows just to run a format. You can also create NTFS disk images from it, which is handy for testing or sending a virtual drive to a colleague.

One keyboard shortcut that saves a step: after plugging in a drive that doesn't auto-mount, you can trigger a manual mount from Disk Manager with Command-M. The preference pane also lets you disable automatic mounting for specific drives—useful if you have an NTFS backup disk you don't want cluttering the desktop every time it's connected.

If you're moving large project folders between operating systems regularly, the driver respects macOS tags and extended attributes as alternate data streams on NTFS. The tags won't show up in Windows Explorer, but they survive the round trip back to your Mac, which keeps a tidy Finder workspace intact.

A small but meaningful fix landed in version 2023.1. If you ever noticed a file showing the wrong date or time after copying it to an NTFS drive, that should no longer happen.

• Fixed an issue that caused incorrect date or time stamps for files copied to NTFS volumes.

• macOS 10.9 or newer
• Works on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs