MacOS – Paragon Driver for Seagate

external-diskhard drivemacos

I'm using MacBook Pro with Mountain Lion (OSX version 10.8.5) and I want to copy some data from the MacBook Pro to an NTFS formatted external hard drive.

I know that we can use the paid solution from Paragon by purchasing its driver. But I recently discovered that the DMG files from Paragon are provided for free on Seagate site here as well:

https://www.seagate.com/in/en/support/software/paragon/

Has anyone used Paragon Driver from Seagate's site and can I use it safely? I'd like to make sure that this Driver works properly before actually using it. On one hand Paragon charges almost 20 USD for it and on the other hand, Seagate offers it for free.

Best Answer

The NTFS drivers provided by Seagate are OEM versions of Paragon's NTFS for Mac 14/15.

They share the same code base but work with Seagate's external (and probably internal, if you replaced the original Apple HDD - not tested) drives only.

By buying an external Seagate drive you already paid for it in the price category of dimes.

Related Solutions

MacOS – Name-error when formatting NTFS on OS X 10.8.4 using “diskutil” (Terminal)

This is not possible using stock OS X since even on a normal drive (and not getting into any core storage considerations), diskutil does not support the UFSD_NTFS and NTFS formats:

Mac:~ bmike$ diskutil listFilesystems
Formattable file systems

These file system personalities can be used for erasing and partitioning.
When specifying a personality as a parameter to a verb, case is not considered.
Certain common aliases (also case-insensitive) are listed below as well.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PERSONALITY                     USER VISIBLE NAME                               
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ExFAT                           ExFAT                                           
Free Space                      Free Space                                      
  (or) free
MS-DOS                          MS-DOS (FAT)                                    
MS-DOS FAT12                    MS-DOS (FAT12)                                  
MS-DOS FAT16                    MS-DOS (FAT16)                                  
MS-DOS FAT32                    MS-DOS (FAT32)                                  
  (or) fat32
HFS+                            Mac OS Extended                                 
Case-sensitive HFS+             Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive)                
  (or) hfsx
Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+   Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)     
  (or) jhfsx
Journaled HFS+                  Mac OS Extended (Journaled)                     
  (or) jhfs+

You would need to use a tool other than diskutil to perform the formatting, but the Apple tools will respect and leave alone these volumes or make space for them by leaving free space or a FAT/ExFAT partition that you could then erase and leave NTFS data on the drive. Additionally, the Paragon pre-sales FAQ for 10.0.2 doesn't mention either Fustion Drive or Core Storage, so I would assume they don't support this. Have you asked them if core storage is supported?

Unable to transfer files from external hard drive

Even reading with NTFS can be an issue with the OS X system. Assuming you don't have any individual files that are greater than or equal to 4GB, I would switch to a more OS X - compatible format like FAT32. This is both readable and writeable to/from OS X and Windows systems. I would reformat the drive to be FAT32, retransfer your data, and then try the transfer onto the OS X system.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – Name-error when formatting NTFS on OS X 10.8.4 using “diskutil” (Terminal)

Unable to transfer files from external hard drive

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