Now before you start up your Windows Virtual Machine, go to Configure > Devices (tab) to make sure you are selecting “Ask me what to do” when a new external device is detected. In this case, assuming you have an external USB drive with NTFS file format using Parallels and a running Windows virtual machine you can write files to NTFS file format straight from your Mac.įirst, make sure Parallel’s preference is set to allow you pick and choose which OS to point to when you plugin your USB drive. How To Leverage Parallels To Write Files to NTFS File System Drive Since Parallels doesn’t have a straightforward documentation explaining how to do this, I will take this opportunity to share with you. After all, if you are running a Windows Virtual Machine on your Mac, you should be allowed to write files to NTFS. This guide will leverage Parallels and Windows VM/ Bootcamp as a bridge to allow user perform write operations to NTFS file format drives. There are many ways you can overcome this limitation if what you need is not only to read files from NTFS, which Mac OS X supports natively out of the box.

While some of this are due to technical limitations, majority of the reasons are bounded by the business decisions not supporting the most popular Windows file system format, NTFS. Mac does not allow write files to NTFS file format drive, it has been like this for many years.