Such a painful task. A while ago, some lovely people wrote an NTFS Driver called NTFS 3G for Mac OS X that allows you to mount, read and write to NTFS drives natively. It’s great if you just need to transfer a few files off a drive. The problem begins when you’re transferring larger files, it’s painfully slow. Yes, emphasis on the word pain in case you missed it.

So, this afternoon I guess I found a solution to my problem. The only problem within my solution is that it requires Parallels Desktop → or similar. If you have said software installed, the solution is simple. Open up Parallels, go to the Virtual Machine configuration. From there click on Shared Folders, check Access Windows folders from Mac, then check Mount virtual disks to Mac OS X Desktop. That’s all there is to it.

From there, mount the external NTFS formatted drive from within Parallels and you’ll also see it appear on your Mac desktop. Then just simply drag the files over from your Mac OS X installation to the virtual drive. While it’s not the most ideal method and as tedious as this task is, it seems to yield much faster results.

If this method worked for you, leave a comment and let me know if the time taken to copy files over was any better.

Update – Then I found Paragon NTFS for Mac OS X → problem solved.