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What is the best free software for OS X Mountain Lion for enabling write support for FAT32 and NTFS?

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possible duplicate of How do I write to NTFS drives in Lion? – Mark Jul 30 '12 at 11:04
OSX can read + write to fat32, just NTFS is read-only (without some 3rd party software). If you use Win7 you could try to use exFAT (allows for files > 4GB and is write- and readable on win7/osx – Chrisii Jul 30 '12 at 11:09
@mark - Let's keep them linked and open. Yes - the answers might overlap, but we can update Lion as versions change and keep this one current (for now) – bmike♦ Mar 29 at 18:05

3 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

At the moment, the only free way for NTFS write access without using abandoned software is using NTFS-3G along with FUSE for OS X. There's a guide for that in the FUSE for OS X wiki.

If you need NTFS writing a lot you might be better off using Tuxera or Paragon, both commercial but more faster and more bulletproof solutions.

As pointed out in the comments, there's no write restriction for FAT32 volumes in OS X.

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up vote 3 down vote

Fuse4x + Ntfs-3g works on OS X Lion. All freeware.

  1. Install Homebrew.

  2. In Terminal, type brew install Fuse4x.

  3. Next, type brew install ntfs-3g.

  4. Type brew info fuse4x-kext . Enter the 2 lines of $ sudo code separately at the start of the text given.

  5. Type brew info ntfs-3g . Enter the 2 lines of code separately after the line "To replace the default Mac OSX automounter:" .

  6. A restart may be prompted.

  7. Done.

All the best.

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worked perfectly on 10.8.3 – dtheory May 13 at 4:58
up vote 5 down vote

Try NTFS-FREE, works for me on ML:

This program allows MacOSX to access Microsoft NTFS formatted harddrives connected by USB port. A modified version of the original Linux code, this program is packaged as a easy-to-use installer so that normal users can install it without hassle

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ntfsfree/

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This works without problems in Mountain Lion. It's free, which is always better than paying $20 ~ $30 for something so basic :) – Wim Haanstra Feb 6 at 14:22

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