Defragment HFS+ 3TB disk on Windows 7 (with MacDrive)?

[tommyjay]

Hi!

I have been using MacDrive for a long time, and I am very happy with it.

But after some time, my WD My Book Studio 3TB Firewire drive has gotten very fragmented. Roughly a half of the disk is full, with very important data. On my MBP 13" I use Drive Genius 3, which diagnosed the drive as very fragmented and that I should defrag is as soon as possible. Because of my work though, I carry my MBP with me very often, and I'm not always at one place plugged in. Thus a question arising: I'd estimate that a defrag of a HFS+ volume would take around two+ days.. Would it be safe to defrag it on my Windows 7 Ultimate, which is a desktop that is turned on all the time.

I'm scared and would like some more knowledge, about it being safe/not safe to defragment the mac formatted disk, which is well working with windows, on the windows.

I don't have access or the time to leave my MBP for two days plugged in on one spot, that's why I'd need some help with this, thanks!

 

[Quad5Ny]

It would be quicker to buy a second 3TB drive and copy everything over. You also gain having data redundancy.

As for safe, how much do you trust MacDrives driver? There is going to be a lot of file shuffling going on while defragmenting. If the driver crashes while writing that's going to result in lost data.

Also ask yourself, speed wise is it worth defragmenting? Microsoft's defragmenter doesn't even bother defraging if the file fragments are larger than 63MB. After a certain point the speed and latency differences between a somewhat fragmented drive and a contiguous drive aren't noticeable.

 

[vistadude]

I searched a bit, but couldn't find any firm conclusion, but I suspect windows will not defragment mac formatted disks.

Personally, I wouldn't defragment an external hard disk. It will hardly speed it up because it seems that you would be constantly adding and removing files, so it would get fragmented anyways. If your transfer speeds are around 20 MB/sec, it's pretty good.