How to read and write NTFS drives on Mac

macOS ships with read-only NTFS support. Apple's hidden write driver is experimental and Apple itself disables it for safety. vmount adds full NTFS read/write through a sandboxed Linux microVM running production-grade NTFS-3G — no kernel extensions, no SIP changes, no Recovery Mode reboot.

The 30-second version

Why macOS doesn't read NTFS write by default

Apple's kernel ships an NTFS driver but only enables read mode. Write mode exists in the same binary but is gated behind an undocumented mount flag because the implementation is incomplete — particularly around journaling, compressed files, and permissions. Tools like Mounty for NTFS toggle this flag for you, inheriting the safety caveats Apple intentionally hid behind.

vmount takes a different approach. Instead of touching the macOS kernel driver, it boots a 60 MB Linux microVM via Apple's native Virtualization.framework, mounts your NTFS drive inside the VM using NTFS-3G (in production use on Linux for nearly two decades), and bridges the mounted filesystem back to Finder over NFS. The on-disk data is touched only by NTFS-3G, which has full Microsoft NTFS specification support — journaling, ACLs, alternate data streams, sparse files, the works.

What this means in practice

• You can delete, rename, and create files on the NTFS drive directly from Finder.
• Drag-drop between APFS and NTFS works in either direction at full USB / Thunderbolt speed.
• Time Machine and Spotlight do not index the NTFS volume by default — same as a native NTFS-read mount, no extra steps.
• If you eject from Finder, vmount cleanly unmounts inside the VM first (NTFS journal is flushed), then the VM shuts down.
• Works on macOS 14 (Sonoma) and 15 (Sequoia), Apple Silicon only (M1, M2, M3, M4).

What you can't do (yet)

vmount is a desktop-app-driven mount manager. A few things to know:

• The drive isn't auto-mounted on plug-in — vmount needs to be running and you click Connect. (We default to keeping vmount in the menu bar so the friction is one click.)
• Write performance on NTFS via vmount is bounded by NTFS-3G, not native macOS APFS. For large sequential writes (multi-GB video files) Paragon NTFS for Mac will be marginally faster — see vmount vs Paragon NTFS for the tradeoff.

Alternatives compared

If you're evaluating options, three other tools come up repeatedly:

• Mounty for NTFS — free, but toggles Apple's experimental write driver. vmount vs Mounty
• Paragon NTFS for Mac — fast, NTFS-only, ~$20 per major version. vmount vs Paragon NTFS
• MacFUSE + ntfs-3g — open source, requires kernel extensions and Reduced Security on Apple Silicon. vmount vs MacFUSE