This file system is not compatible with Mac OS. NTFS is a Windows-based file system and is used widely by most of external hard drives. When you encounter this type of issue, just open Disk Utility to check if the file system of your WD external hard drive is NTFS. When I connect my WD Drive to my MacBook Air, it gets mounted fine, I can open files and copy the data but I'm unable to delete data or move and rename the folders which are on WD Element 1TB Drive, I found out that is because my drive status is Read Only.When I drag files from Mac desktop to my WD Elements external hard drive, nothing happens!.When I connect it to my Mac, it can be opened, but it shows nothing.

I have a 1TB WD external hard drive and have stored 5GB documents on it.WD external hard drive read-only issues on Mac: You also can quickly recover lost data from read-only WD external hard drive or erased WD external hard drive with Do Your Data Recovery for Mac. 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.Summary: this guide can help you solve WD external hard drive read-only on Mac issue. 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. 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. 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.

Setting up wd elements for mac