# Does an NTFS SSD work for samples with a Mac?



## Craig Allen (Feb 9, 2019)

I know that Mac OS can (only) READ from an NTFS formatted disk, and not (natively) write to one.
I'm thinking that if an external SSD is only used for Virtual Instrument hosting and sample playback (hits, loops) hosting, that it should work.

Can anyone confirm?

Many thanks.

Craig


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## dflood (Feb 9, 2019)

With Paragon NTFS for Mac you can read and write to NTFS drives. I use it all the time. Not sure if there is any performance hit.
https://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

Edit: I should have mentioned I do not use it for samples


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## jbuhler (Feb 9, 2019)

Maybe I was misunderstanding the discussions, but in previous threads some have reported problems in streaming samples from disks not properly formatted for MacOs.


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## Craig Allen (Feb 9, 2019)

jbuhler said:


> Maybe I was misunderstanding the discussions, but in previous threads some have reported problems in streaming samples from disks not properly formatted for MacOs.



I can imagine there is a real limitation of not being able to install to an NTFS disk. I'm supposing that simply reading sample info that's already on the disk should work. 
I'll give it a try...


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## jbuhler (Feb 9, 2019)

Craig Allen said:


> I can imagine there is a real limitation of not being able to install to an NTFS disk. I'm supposing that simply reading sample info that's already on the disk should work.
> I'll give it a try...


The reported problem was specifically slow read times for streaming to kontakt . I don't recall which disk format was causing the trouble.


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## EvilDragon (Feb 10, 2019)

ExFAT has the problem, not NTFS.


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## Ruffian Price (Feb 11, 2019)

I had no problems accessing Kontakt libraries on NTFS drives when I was dualbooting OSX and Windows. Didn't need any external tools, didn't _feel_ like the performance was lower (don't have metrics though)


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## JPQ (Feb 24, 2019)

EvilDragon said:


> ExFAT has the problem, not NTFS.


Do you know why?


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## EvilDragon (Feb 24, 2019)

It's just a slow file system compared to NTFS or HFS(+), that's all.


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## LinusW (Feb 25, 2019)

I can also recommend Paragon NTFS. It's cheap and makes it easy to use external drives cross-platform and with much better reliability than exFAT.


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## wuubb (Mar 1, 2019)

EvilDragon said:


> ExFAT has the problem, not NTFS.


Wait really?? Is that why I'm constantly getting disk overloads in Kontakt? I have all my drives formatted as ExFAT for Win/Mac comparability


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## JamieLang (Mar 1, 2019)

Pretty sure Apple's implementation of ExFAT is uselessly slow, yes.


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## EvilDragon (Mar 1, 2019)

wuubb said:


> Wait really?? Is that why I'm constantly getting disk overloads in Kontakt? I have all my drives formatted as ExFAT for Win/Mac comparability



Yes. Don't use it. Use NTFS - Mac can still read those drives.


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