Using a 1TB portable hard drive formatted OS X Extended, Speed Test clocked 104.2 megabytes per second (MBps) read and 104.8 MBps write connected via USB 3.0 on a mid-2012 Retina MacBook Pro. I ran Blackmagic Speed Test to see how NTFS for Mac 14 fared against a native OS X drive. (Paragon recently released a free edition for OS X Yosemite and earlier.) Version 14 is fully compatible with OS X El Capitan, but Intel systems running OS X Lion or earlier remain limited to version 12, which is also included free of charge. I’m happy to report Paragon has addressed both shortcomings: It’s now half the previous price, and up to six times faster than At nearly $40, the software was also expensive for Mac users who required infrequent write access.

Native performanceĪlthough NTFS for Mac has always been a convenient utility worth owning, it was typically slower at writing than native OS X volumes. Paragon relocated the format option to System Preferences, and also threw in new options to verify or repair NTFS volumes.

The software also now includes built-in verify and repair options specially tuned for Windows-formatted volumes. While earlier versions relied on Apple’s Disk Utility to format drives, the latest version relocates this option to System Preferences.

Ntfs on mac os x