On Mac systems, hard drives can be formatted in a variety of ways. If a hard drive is formatted 'case-sensitive', the system distinguishes between uppercase and lowercase letters that are used for volume and folder names.
Important Note: Native Instruments products are not compatible with Case-sensitive hard drives.
To find out if you are using a case-sensitive hard drive, follow these steps:
- Open Disk Utility from Mac HD > Applications > Utilities.
- Choose the hard drive volume that you want to verify from the list on the left hand side of the window.
- The description shows if the selected hard drive's format is Case-sensitive:
Make sure to only use hard drives that are not formatted case-sensitive for installing and using NI products on Mac computers.
For best results, your external drive should be formatted the same as your operating system's native format.
- On macOS 10.12 Sierra (and earlier versions of OS X), the standard HFS+ / Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format is recommended.
- On macOS 10.13 High Sierra and later, the Apple File System (APFS) format is recommended.
Note: See this article from Apple Support to learn how to reformat a storage drive on macOS.