How to defragment an External Hard Drive

I would honestly not recommend it. For any new video project, you should start with clean drives.

I assume you've already cleared your render files, and that's not the problem?

If you have a spare drive, I would advise that you copy your media files to the blank drive, wipe the original drive, then copy the files back. Much safer (and probably faster) than defragmenting.

Matt

DALE31 wrote:
I have an iMac 24" which I got last November. I have 3 external 2TB Lacie hard drives for a 6TB total.
I have been having some glitches in some of the video footage I created and I would like to be able to defragment all three hard drives. I looked thru the manual and they do not tell you how to defragment the hard drive.
ALSO...is it safe to defragment a hard drive with files on the drive?
Thank You

Instead of taking hours to defrag it and possibly losing all the data, simply copy the data and files on the HD to another external HD and reformat the first one. Any defragging software requires a backup anyway because the process can go awry.

You can use a quick format on the first disk, or even simpler, repartition it into 2 partitions and then back into a single partition. Then simply copy the data/files back. Simple and foolproof.