There isn’t a single solution to all these woes, but here’s a quick guide to addressing these bugbears that involve external hard drive performance and connection to Mac. There are plenty of annoying things that can happen while using your Macbook, one of which is plugging in a USB hard drive and finding out that you cannot write to it, or copy to and from the external drive. When the drive has formatting errors, you can use Disk Utility’s First Aid to fix those errors. So, you can try to ignore ownership of the drive to fix the read-only problem. Further, if you are using the external hard drive on older Mac OS X system, then the newer macOS Mojave system may not recognize the access permission settings. You can view the files saved on the NTFS-formatted partition or drive but.
By default, macOS can mount a Windows NTFS volume or drive in read-only mode.
