The following applies to all drives in question - a hard drive, USB stick, SSD, or any other external media. If it says “read-only,” you know the problem is permissions-related. Under Sharing & Permissions, it will tell you what access you have.

Look at the bottom of the Get Info window.If the Format is APFS, MacOS Extended, or FAT 32, then that is not the problem, and you’ll need to check permissions. Under General, you should see a list of parameters. To determine which of these is causing the problem, select the disk in the Finder and press Command-I, or right-click it and choose Get Info. Some permissions settings prevent your Mac or your user account from writing to the disk.This can happen with disks that are formatted as NTFS. The drive is formatted in a way that means your Mac can read it but not write to it.There are two possibilities when you see a message telling you a hard drive, USB stick, or other external storage media is read-only. Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to fix the problem. You may see a message telling you that the drive is read-only. However, you may encounter errors now and again, and one of the most common issues is that your Mac is unable to write to the disk. Most of us use some kind of external storage device with our Mac at some time or another, whether it’s a USB stick, flash drive, external hard disk, or SSD.

But to help you do it all by yourself, we’ve gathered our best ideas and solutions below.įeatures described in this article refer to the MacPaw site version of CleanMyMac X. So here’s a tip for you: Download CleanMyMac to quickly solve some of the issues mentioned in this article.

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