Defragmenting an External Hard Drive on a Macbook Air

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Level 1

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Defragmenting an External Hard Drive on a Macbook Air

So I have a portable hard drive I use with my Macbook Air. It is a 4TB one that was gifted to my a year ago for Christmas. The problem is, the person who gifted it to me didn't realize it was a Windows based one that needed special software to be viewed on a Mac. I purchased the app and have been using it just fine. But lately space on the hard drive has randomly been disappearing. On my Mac that's never been an issue. It reminds me of issues I used to have way back when I used to have a PC. It makes me think I need to defrag it. But I have a Mac with a flash hard drive and use a mounting software to view the external hard drive. I can't find any de-fragmenting app that will work on my Mac. I know it doesn't work on the flash hard drive, but shouldn't it recognize the other kind of hard drive that is the external one? Is there any program I can use to defragment it or anything I can do to fix it. I don't have a hundred dollars lying around to buy another external hard drive right now to be able to copy the files to a new one.

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 10.13

Posted on Jan 21, 2021 6:30 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Eau Rouge

Level 8

42,596 points

Jan 21, 2021 9:48 PM in response to philstar22

Sounds like the drive gifted to you was set formatted for use with Windows

possibly set up as NTFS, which macs can read but not write to, this is maybe why you

thought it was necessary to buy third party software to use it.

You do not need to buy software to use an external drive with your mac.

If you were gifted this disk from your Windows friend all you had to do was

erase it and reformat it for use for mac.

Open Disk Utility.

Select the Disk in the left hand column not any indented Volume.

Click Erase.

Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

Scheme: GUID Partition Map.

Click Erase.

When Done quit Disk Utility.

Please note the above procedure will completely erase all data on the Disk

so make a back up of the Disk before attempting this procedure.

Your drive is now ready to be used with your mac, you do not

need any defrag software, let the macs OS manage the disk.

If you need this disk to be usable between macs and Windows then

at Format enter exFAT

and Scheme Master Boot Record.

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Answer 2

Limnos

Level 10

418,615 points

Jan 21, 2021 8:25 PM in response to philstar22

I think you are looking for something super super specialized and it isn't out there. Mac system software handles some defragmentation so even a Mac defrag utility is not common. Now you're looking for one that runs on Macs and handles a NTFS drive.

Your real solution is to temporarily park the files on another drive, then use Disk Utility to reformat the drive to GUID HFS Mac extended journaled, not case-sensitive. There isn't really such a thing as a "Windows drive" just a drive formatted for Windows. You need to re-format it to Mac so you don't have to deal with the extra software and the Mac can do the defragmenting.

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Defragmenting an External Hard Drive on a Macbook Air

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