MAC High Sierra transfers to WD

Question

Is it necessary to format WD passport just to move and store files from MAC High Sierra to WD?

Tried to move docs from the MAC to WD but cannot determine where they are or folder to put them in.

Answer 1

Unless you bought a Mac-specific version of the WD Passport, it will come formatted with the Windows NTFS filesystem format. High Sierra can read that type of format, but can't write to it. You can confirm this from the command line:

$ mount | grep ntfs
/dev/disk3s1 on /Volumes/My Passport (ntfs, local, nodev, nosuid, read-only, noowners)

Note the "read-only" keyword in the list of mount options. If you prefer using the mouse, find the icon for the drive on your desktop, use Control-click on it and select "Get Info". Does the pop-up window report that the "Format" of the drive is NTFS? If so, that also confirms this hypothesis. The "Get Info" window won't mention that the drive is mounted read-only, but it is.

The normal way to fix this is to reformat the drive with a Mac-specific format, or with the ExFat format if you want to share the drive with a Windows machine. Instructions for this would be at Western Digital's web site at this link but their site seems to be down at the moment, so try this Macword article instead.

If for some reason you want to keep the drive NTFS and still write to it with your Mac, there are 3rd-party software packages that will install write support for NTFS. I haven't tried any of them so I can't make any recommendations there.