Why do I need Paragon NTFS for Mac?

[TLMurray]

I've owned it for many years simply because I buy a lot of stuff to help me use my lone Mac in the raging sea of Windows and NTFS servers. But now I am in an environment about half-and-half, where everyone is on the same shared Windows NTFS drive, and everyone is fine. I have not tested everything, but it would appear that the only thing I could not to without Paragon NTFS was (for instance) format a thumb drive in NTFS. What else am I missing?

[Jerry A. Copus]

I've owned it for many years simply because I buy a lot of stuff to help me use my lone Mac in the raging sea of Windows and NTFS servers. But now I am in an environment about half-and-half, where everyone is on the same shared Windows NTFS drive, and everyone is fine. I have not tested everything, but it would appear that the only thing I could not to without Paragon NTFS was (for instance) format a thumb drive in NTFS. What else am I missing?

There is a common confusion about the difference between file SYSTEMS and file PROTOCOLS. NTFS is a file system (like FAT32, HFS, APFS, BTRFS, EXT3 etc.) Out of the box, your Mac understands how to interact with some types but not others, and typically when they are directly connected to your machine like a USB drive. For example, macOS can read NTFS-formatted volumes, but not write to them. Paragon NTFS is an add-on that allows you to WRITE to an NTFS-formatted disk to (among other things).

In the case of a remote volume (a server), the server's OS may know how to interact with various file systems, but it PRESENTS them to remote clients using a file protocol like SMB, AFP, WebDAV, etc. The remote client does not know what file system the remote server is using nor does it care. So, it's very common for a Windows server to have NTFS formatted disks that are presented to clients via the SMB protocol for example. If your client knows how to speak SMB, you're largely fine. The only time you *need* something like Paragon NTFS on a Mac is when you need to *directly* read/write to a NTFS-formatted disk.

Hope that helps.