How to Defragment a FATx or NTFS (NON-MAC) partition/drive in Mac OSx

mat060 wrote:

This is not another discussion about "How to defragment a native Mac partition/drive"

I've been roaming around lots of forums and everybody ask how to defragment a Mac Drive or Partition.. and the answers are always like "Why would you even want to defragment a your Mac.. OSx automatically does it for you.. Mac is so wonderful that ... bla bla bla..." ... I GOT IT, Ok..?

This time is different, I would like to know...

What tool should I use to defragment a NON-Mac Disk/Partition??

Say that you happend to have an external hard drive, which is in FATx or NTFS (Windows) format, then you attach it to your Mac and.. wel.. you want to defragment the disk from there because you just dont have windows Laptop/PC on hand.

Is this even possible from Mac, given that Mac OS is so wonderful that does not even need to defrag its file system?

I hope everybody understand my question before giving me the same answers once again.

Thank you very much!

Use DiskWarrior, respect your fellow users here, and perhaps stop with the multicolour, multi-font sized posts, which annoy the h#ll out of people that would normally help you.

DiskWarrior will do all you need to do, except perhaps for a Permissions repair once or twice a year if you believe it to be necessary.

Cheers

Pete

Even though a Windows formatted external drive may need defragging every now and then it certainly does not need to be done on a Mac computer. If you don't have a Windows PC handy, or one at all, then wait until you do and do the defrag on that PC. In the case that you don't have a Windows PC at all then your external drive should not be formatted with any of the Windows formats. That is IMHO just foolish. If you have no Windows PCs why in the world would you have an external formatted FAT32, exFAT or at the worst NTFS as Mac can't write to NTFS formatted drives.

Now if you have a boot camp partition with Windows installed on it then boot to Windows to do the defrag.

To asnwer your real question. No it is not possible, at least not with OS X natively without having some add-on program and even then I'm not sure it can be done successfully.

If you want to defrag your Mac, you don't even need a utility to do it, just a spare partition. In the past, I've used programs like Drive Genius to do that, but it took just a bit over half the time to do it this way.

1) You can use Disk Utility, the free version of SuperDuper!, or Carbon Copy Cloner.

2) Clone the startup drive you want to defrag to another drive.

3) Boot to the cloned drive.

4) Erase the original drive with Disk Utility.

5) Clone the drive back.

Sounds like a bit of work, but is easy, accomplishes the task and takes less time to do the same thing as a third party app.

mat060 wrote:

petermac87 wrote:

Use DiskWarrior, respect your fellow users here, and perhaps stop with the multicolour, multi-font sized posts, which annoy the h#ll out of people that would normally help you.

Regarding to DiskWarrior, It does not seem to be capable of actually defragment files, that true?

No, but it may optimise your directories on a Mac drive (close as you will get), but when I read your post again, in between the rants, I see you want to defrag an external drive that will not be formatted to Mac. So in the question you are asking, I agree with Shootist and say NO. Use a PC. They are pretty common to find.

Good Luck

Pete

DiskWarrior will only work with Mac formatted drives. On top of that, it only optimizes the file table. It does not defragment the files themselves.

No I have not. I own several Windows PC and have no need to do any defragmenting on Mac.