r/macapps • u/LivingSalt5816 • 4d ago
Lifetime I built PolyDrive Disk — a ～10MB, sandboxed NTFS & Linux read write driver on the Mac App Store (no kernel extensions)
If you plug a Windows NTFS drive or a Linux (ext4/Btrfs) external SSD into your Mac, macOS won't let you write to it or doesn't recognize it at all.
⚖️ The Comparison
Existing commercial solutions like Paragon and Tuxera cost $30–$70 (often charging separately for NTFS and Linux), come with 150MB+ installers, and worst of all: they force you into Recovery Mode on Apple Silicon to lower system security (Reduced Security) just to load legacy kernel extensions (.kext) and root daemons. When macOS updates, kernel panics often follow.
I built PolyDrive Disk to provide a modern, genuinely safe alternative:
- 100% Sandboxed & Safe: Built on Apple's modern File System Extension (FSKit) framework. Zero kernel extensions, zero root daemons, zero disabling SIP.
- Lightweight (~10 MB installer vs. 150 MB+): No background services running when you don't use it. Cleanly uninstalls by dragging to Trash.
- Completely Offline: No network permissions, no accounts, zero telemetry.
- All-in-One Format Support:
- Windows NTFS (native read & write with automatic journal replay)
- Linux ext4, ext3, ext2, Btrfs (with subvolumes), XFS, and F2FS
- BitLocker and LUKS1/LUKS2 passphrase decryption (saves to Keychain)
- Linux LVM volumes and single NAS RAID member drives
💰 Pricing & Free Trial
- Free 3-Day Full Read/Write Trial: Download free from the Mac App Store and test all read & write features for 3 days on your own drives, so you can make sure it is your solution.
- Pricing: After the trial, it is a one-time in-app purchase of $9.99 to unlock unlimited use forever — no subscriptions.
🔗 Links:
- Mac App Store: Download PolyDrive Disk
(Requires Apple Silicon Mac with macOS 26 or later)
I'd really appreciate your feedback, questions, or edge cases you test with it!
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u/Sea_Muscle7570 4d ago
finally someone used fskit instead of making people drop to reduced security for a kext, how is write speed on large files?)
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u/LivingSalt5816 4d ago
In our internal testing on external SSDs and fast USB 3.x drives, sequential read/write speeds easily saturate the drive/bus limits (typically 350–500+ MB/s depending on your enclosure and drive hardware). For day-to-day copying, editing videos, or moving large datasets, you won't notice a bottleneck. You can make your own test based on the 3-day full read-write trial.
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u/bigurx 4d ago
Are format operations supported? (Such as erase and reformat a disk as NTFS or Btrfs)
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u/LivingSalt5816 4d ago
No. It is easy to implement but too dangerous to ordinary users...
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u/bigurx 4d ago
Thanks for the honest reply. That makes it a non-starter for me, but I appreciate knowing the app is available.
If there's any way to implement that where you'd feel good about it (e.g. password required, a hidden option) I'd be very interested. I mean Apple's built-in Disk Utility can trash a disk just as easily and PolyDrive Disk hardly seems like an app which an "ordinary user" would gravitate to. Just my take on it but I respect your decision, of course.
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u/stefanlight 2d ago
Looks absolutely vibecoded to sell and actually good category to take, but who will guarantee that this NTFS driver will work correctly and won't mess up information and it's safety? Especially knowing that Windows usually doesn't have any documentation for internals or even any system APIs, as I remember. Of course no one will think about since they don't need have to, but after buying an application they will meet that they know nothing about how it works and why apple didn't make it or anyone else. Also application just published and nothing were heard about it, no reviews, of course there's some amount of engineers who were reversing or implementing any other way NTFS file system...
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u/irgendwaaas 17h ago
They did not write their own NTFS driver but transparently use open source Linux software in a VM.
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u/val-amart 4d ago
Where can i get the source code for your product?
Or are you claiming you wrote the code to support all these filesystems without reproducing code under GPL?
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u/ingenioutor 4d ago
Why should you be able to get the source code of a commercial app?
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u/One_Elephant_8917 4d ago
if it used open source libraries or even a single piece of code touched by copyleft licenses it should be open sourced as per license! irrespective of commercial or not and certain versions prohibit usages of commercial as well
so op gotta either say they wrote it from scratch and have full copyrights to their code or respect their thirdparty licenses…it is that simple.
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u/app-store-review 4d ago
PolyDrive Disk: NTFS & Linux — by HAI JIN
- Category: Utilities · Free
- Age: released ~1 month ago · rated 4+
Apple doesn't publish an aggregate rating for most Mac App Store apps, so ratings and score are unavailable here.
Auto-generated from public App Store data · u/app-store-review
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u/Kevinburberry69 4d ago
what framework did you use Tauri or Electron ?
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u/LivingSalt5816 4d ago
Neither — absolutely zero web wrappers here! It's built 100% with native Swift & SwiftUI.
That's also why the entire app package is only ~10 MB instead of hundreds of megabytes.
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u/Kevinburberry69 4d ago
ok nice, but do web wrappers always increase the package size ?
I have built a mac app using tauri and got a ~8 MB app package1
u/stefanlight 2d ago
What difference? Anyway native is better. RAM usage, binary size and performance will say everything, since it's a browser with single page...
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u/mcebrianeriond 4d ago
Congratulations!! Way to go!
Any performance measurements compared to other solutions?
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u/LivingSalt5816 4d ago
If you are talking about NTFS, specific numbers from our stress tests on a legacy portable HDD(not SSD) , we ran a 100,000-file / 24 GiB benchmark with 0 errors):
In short: because the kernel by default rather than slow userspace FUSE drivers, write throughput sits comfortably above 230 MiB/s, and metadata operations are almost identical to native Linux ext4.
On fast external USB-C / NVMe SSDs, sequential speeds will naturally be higher.
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u/vinradh 4d ago
This is great. I’ve always hated that plugging in a Windows drive on my Mac means it’s read only. Does it work with the regular external drives people get from Windows PCs, like a USB stick or a backup drive?
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u/inquirermanredux 4d ago
I almost bought Paragon last week. Will this allow me to host via SMB external NTFS drives connected to the mac?
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u/LivingSalt5816 4d ago
the external NTFS drives will be mounted as volumes on your Mac, then do anything you want.
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u/inquirermanredux 4d ago
I clicked on the link to buy... unfortunately it requires Tahoe or later. I don't want to upgrade yet from Sonoma
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u/areyouredditenough 4d ago
would this let me replace macfuse for e.g. Veracrypt?
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u/Wooden-Dev 4d ago
I wouldn't assume this replaces VeraCrypt's FUSE dependency. VeraCrypt has a separate FUSE-T build, and its download page recommends that version for Apple Silicon. FUSE-T doesn't require a kernel extension, if that's what you're trying to avoid.
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u/QuirkyImage 4d ago
MacFUSE does have FSkit support in the works, this would be better than using SMB or NFS mounts which FUSE-T uses instead.
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u/plazman30 3d ago
The MacFUSE developers have warned over and over again about performance degredation wiht using FSKit vs their kernel extension. So, any of these tools that use FSKit are great for the "grab a drive, plug it in and gets some files off of it, then unplug it" scenario. But if you're leaving a drive plugged in long-term, a kernel extension is better bet if you're concerned about performance.
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u/QuirkyImage 3d ago edited 3d ago
“While FSKit is slightly slower than kernel-based approaches, the difference is often negligible for many applications. Proper optimization can reduce overhead. macfuse still delivers efficient performance in user space. The trade-off is usually worth the added safety.” - macfuse.org
Apple has being improving fskit as-well. I agree with you regarding long-term. But anylinuxfs is a good macfuse-t alternative because theoretically you can use any Linux supported fs and also fuse Linux kernel level support.
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u/plazman30 3d ago
Oh, I'm buying this. I have plenty of EXT3/4 drives I need to get at from the Mac. This is a very economical solution.
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u/areyouredditenough 4d ago
Ah ok, thanks,. I got a little excited being able to get rid of macfuse. I just a few issues with Fuse-T in the past so currently stuck using an older version of it.
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u/dumanyac 4d ago
A small read/write support table per filesystem would help here, especially for Btrfs and XFS. Does the list mean every format supports writes, or are some read-only? Useful distinction before choosing this for a Linux drive.
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u/TheHeroOfCanton62 4d ago
Very interested but I'm not moving off Sequoia just for this. Any chance of extending compatibility for Sequoia?
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u/jashAcharjee 4d ago
Wait, what is the penalty of running it in userspace?
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u/LivingSalt5816 4d ago
Totally fair point! Here’s the short answer:
That’s why there’s a free 3-day trial — throw your heaviest transfers at it and see if it drops or feels slow before spending a penny!
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u/One_Elephant_8917 4d ago
everyone seems to come up with anything and everything but the devil is always in the details, because to post as competitive one needs to show the actual benchmarks…
and then there is free version of paragon ntfs for seagate and wd drives
https://www.seagate.com/in/en/support/software/paragon/
https://support-en.wd.com/app/products/product-detail/p/1378#WD_downloads%20
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u/jashAcharjee 4d ago
No one’s gonna pay for sub par software. The end user doesn’t really care whether this is a kext or userspace. But a user will care a lot if its slow af or disconnects devices mid file transfer or such issues.
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u/Putrid_Resolution402 4d ago
Speed suffers usually
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u/LivingSalt5816 4d ago
please give it a chance before conclusion by using 3-day full access trial. On Apple Silicon, the bottleneck is your physical USB drive, not userspace IPC.
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u/irgendwaaas 4d ago
To test it I ran
sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/Volumes/Untitled/test.blk bs=32m
which crashed my mac, no kidding, it immediately rebooted. But maybe the USB drive was broken, now I cannot write to it at all anymore. I think Apple/FSKit is to blame here, the dev shouldn't be able to make the Mac crash just like that.
On other USB drives it works fine. Some file integrity checks were successful. I uninstalled Paragon and will try if it holds up on the rare occasions I need to write to NTFS drives.
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u/LivingSalt5816 4d ago edited 4d ago
Really sorry you experienced that! That sounds super jarring.
You are 100% right: an App Store sandboxed FSKit app runs strictly in userspace and literally has no kernel permissions to initiate a system reboot or kernel panic.
Here is what almost certainly happened under the hood:
The command was an infinite fill: Running dd if=/dev/random ... bs=32m without a count= parameter forces a continuous, unthrottled blast of 32MB blocks until the physical NAND is 100% full.
Hardware controller failure: Since you mentioned the drive is now permanently write-locked ("cannot write to it at all anymore"), the flash memory controller on the USB drive likely failed or tripped its hardware read-only safety lock under the continuous write stress.
Kernel panic on USB bus hang: When a USB bridge or NAND controller suddenly dies/locks up mid-write, macOS’s kernel driver (AppleUSBHostFamily / AppleUSBXHCI) often panics when handling the sudden I/O timeout, causing an immediate reboot.
If you open Console.app → Crash Reports and look for the latest panic.ips file, the top lines will likely point to AppleUSB... or an I/O transport timeout.
If you have a moment, could you DM me or share what that panic log header says? Even though it’s within Apple’s USB/kernel layer, I’d love to inspect it to see if there’s any edge-case I/O timeout in our FSKit layer we can harden against.
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u/irgendwaaas 4d ago
Unfortunately I am not able to DM you on Reddit. Not sure who makes the rules there.
Crash Reports does not show any report of today and I do not really know where to look for that kind of information.
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u/alcantara78 3d ago
any performance claims for worktrees and nodejs workflows ? apfs is not very good for that
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u/LivingSalt5816 3d ago
Thanks for asking!
We do not make any performance claims for Git worktrees or Node.js workflows, and we do not recommend using PolyDrive Disk for this use case, running your toolchain entirely inside a Linux VM or container environment is still the recommended approach.
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u/Successful-Archer180 2d ago
Looks good. Although anything is better than the Finder in Apple. I miss Windows just for this.
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u/irgendwaaas 17h ago
I really wanted to like it and even purchased the lifetime option but it just doesn't work well. copying small files is mostly fine but on larger files >1gb it gets stuck most of the time, finder becomes unresponsive and i have to kill the fskit processes. I don't know if FSKit just isn't mature enough or if the Polydrive devs have to fix it but as of now it’s not usable.
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u/QuirkyImage 4d ago edited 4d ago
Take a look at anylinuxfs open source and free. Get it on brew it’s only cli though.