While macOS can read NTFS drives without additional configuration, the operating system needs additional software to write to NTFS drives. This file system does not suffer the same limitations as FAT32, but macOS cannot write to NTFS drives natively. Today, most Windows hard drives are formatted with NTFS. As hard drive capacity has increase, FAT32’s popularity has decreased. FAT32 also cannot format drives larger than 2 TB without a little convincing. You can write more than 4 gigs of data to the drive, but you cannot transfer a single file that is larger than 4 gigabytes to a FAT32-formatted drive.
The only limitation is that it cannot transfer single files over 4 gigabytes. Fortunately, macOS can read and write to FAT32 drives with no additional software or setup. Windows uses NTFS in most cases, but sometimes drives are formatted as FAT32 as well. The stumbling block in simple cross-compatibility between macOS and Windows is the file system. If you have a hard drive from Windows that you need to access on macOS, follow one of the routes below for accessing the file. But working with Windows hard drives still requires some setup and thought. There was a time when there was virtually no cross-compatibility between the operating systems, and files edited in Windows basically could not be transferred to the Mac. It’s much easier now than it use to be, of course. Interacting with Windows from macOS has always been a pain.
