NTFS drives are common given the number of Windows devices in the technology ecosystem. However, Mac OSX (at the time of this post) does not have an easy way to read/write to/from an external NTFS drive. These instructions explain how to work around the issue of not being able to interact with an NTFS drive on OSX.

Process

Googling around, I was able to piece together a small workaround that enabled interaction with the NTFS file system on OSX. Many of the pieces/steps are taken from the sites mentioned in the Credit section at the end of this post. Note that these steps assume that the OSX environment already has HomeBrew installed.

$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go/install)"
$ brew doctor
$ brew remove fuse4x
$ brew install ntfs-3g
$ sudo mv /sbin/mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs.orig
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/ntfs-3g/2014.2.15/sbin/mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs
$ brew install osxfuse

# for info only, if curious
$ brew info osxfuse

$ sudo /bin/cp -RfX /usr/local/Cellar/osxfuse/2.6.4/Library/Filesystems/osxfusefs.fs /Library/Filesystems
$ sudo chmod +s /Library/Filesystems/osxfusefs.fs/Support/load_osxfusefs

Once the above have been performed, detach and re-attach the external NTFS drive. The drive should appear, and inspecting the “Get Info” option for the drive should show the drive mounted in read/write mode.

Credit

Contributions to some of the above were gleaned from:

Coolest Guides on the Planet - How to Write to a NTFS Drive from OS X Mavericks