In a few simple steps you are ready to go and can save your back-up files to the external drive, keeping your information safe and giving you peace of mind. There are two separate versions listed on the Seagate site, one for macOS 10.10 to 10.15, and another for the Macs running an Apple silicon chip. Reformatting an external hard drive for use with Mac OS is not as difficult as it might seem. Or, if you bought an external hard drive from Seagate, it should come with Paragon Driver to let you read and write data interchangeably on Windows and Mac without formatting the drive. You can use a third-party app to write to an NTFS disk on a Mac. As a consequence, you won’t be able to add, change, or delete files. On macOS, you can only read disks in this format, not write to them. The easiest way to do that is hit CMD and the spacebar at the same time and type in 'Disk Utility' to find the program. Is your external hard drive showing up as “read only” on your Mac? This usually happens because the drive is formatted with Microsoft’s NTFS file format.

Here’s a guide to macOS disk permissions to help you understand the technical concepts. This lets you set the permissions to Read & Write to yourself while keeping the read-only for other users. How to format a MAC formatted drive to NTFS for it to work on Windows 10 and other versions of Windows that read NTFS. Press Windows Key + R to open the Run dialog, type diskmgmt.msc into the box, and press Enter to open it. If this is a drive you formatted yourself, you can change the individual permissions in the box above. You won’t see this option if the external storage is used as a boot drive or a Time Machine backup drive.

Reformat mac hard drive