Macbook Air and external drive

I have a Toshiba 1.5 TB external hard drive that is formatted NTFS.  It works fine with my Macbook Pro OS X 10.7.3 however II can only read files on my Macbook Air OS X 10.9;1.   I have tried using the disk utility to verify the disk etc. and tried to change permissions, however the options are grayed out.  I am not sure how to change the permissions to make it read and write on my macbook air. Do I need to reformat? If so, will that impact the ability of my Macbook Pro to read the drive?  If not then does anyone have any ideas?  Thanks

If you format it, just so you know, ....assuming you DONT,......that nukes all the data on that HD 

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