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Need to move files from NTFS to HFS+, how to make it?

I have multiple large video files on an NTFS formatted hard drive so read-only. I have time capsule backup, and two external hard drives (1) older WD TB NTFS with 500 GB of video files almost all larger than 4 GB Have a new Seagate 3 TB hard drive. I want to have both external hard drives formatted HFS+. Set up Seagate with 1.5 TB HFS+ and 1.5 TB FAT 32 with the idea to copy over all the video from NTFS to the FAT 32, then copy them over to HFS+, downsize the 1.5 FAT 32 to zero, and then reformat the WD to HFS+ and viola, all would be in HFS+ and life would be good. Did not know about the 4 GB transfer file limit in FAT 32. Have spent a great deal of time reading about solutions but everything seems to be built around making NTFS read and write but I want to get everything into HFS+.

Best Answered by

Amanda Wong

Answered on Tuesday, August 27, 2024

Why not directly format the whole Seagate drive as HFS+? Then transfer all the 500 GB videos from the NTFS drive directly to the Seagate HFS+ drive. 

All your videos are stored on the two NTFS external hard drives, and you want to move them to the new Seagate external drive. Actually, you can make it straightforwardly, just moving files from the NTFS drives to the Seagate drive after formatting it with HFS+.

NTFS is not supported by Mac by default such as WD My Passport is read-only on Mac, and you can not directly move videos from the NTFS drive to your Mac. But you can directly transfer the files from a read-only NTFS drive to another external drive without any limitations.

If you need to transfer files from an NTFS drive to Mac, I'd like to recommend iBoysoft NTFS for Mac, it automatically mounts your Windows NTFS volume in read-write mode and provides a fast file transfer speed. 

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iBoysoft NTFS for Mac

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HFS+ is a macOS-exclusive file system. Just format the Seagate drive with HFS+ in Disk Utility instead of FAT32 and HFS+ given that FAT32 doesn't support files that are larger than 4 GB,  then transfer videos from the two NTFS drives to the Seagate HFS+ drive.