External USB drive (FAT32) - can I defrag? can I change to HFS+?

[jdavtz]

I have an oldish 60GB external USB2 drive; it's pretty slow and I wonder if it needs defragging - is there a way to do this? It's formatted from my old windows pc in FAT32 - should/could I just re-format it as HFS+ (or something else?)... or do USB drives have to be FAT32?

Thanks,
Jonathan.

 

[Blurg]

I believe you can reformat it using Disk Utility.

 

[bearbo]

I have an oldish 60GB external USB2 drive; it's pretty slow and I wonder if it needs defragging - is there a way to do this? It's formatted from my old windows pc in FAT32 - should/could I just re-format it as HFS+ (or something else?)... or do USB drives have to be FAT32?

Thanks,
Jonathan.

you want to defragment it, which implies there are stuff on there... you can't change it to HFS+ without formating it, which would erase all your stuff.. if you can drag those stuff else where while you format it, then you are golden

and to format it, use Application/Utilities/Disk Utility (as the previous poster said)