Do external drives still get defragmented when using MacDrive on Windows?

[JChance]

I use PT 7.4 on both a Mac and a Windows machine. I usually do my tracking on my Apple Powerbook, but use the family Windows Vista desktop for editing or opening large sessions since it has more horsepower, bigger screen, etc.

As a result, I've got MacDrive 7 installed on the Vista machine so I can easily go back & forth with the same FW external drive.

Today, when doing some edits on a project I was working on, I was getting some DAE errors on the Vista machine. There were quite a few plugins going, but I was still only hitting about 25% on the CPU meter, as the desktop is dual-core, 2 gigs of RAM, and I was editing with my buffer at 2048.

On a couple of different sessions, it would freeze up when trying to bounce & tell me my drive was "too slow or fragmented."

I finally was able to solve the problem when I consolidated all of my audio files in the sessions. So that leads me to my question!

When using the Mac- formatted drive on Windows, does it still somehow get fragmented? And if so, how can I defragment it?

When I check for errors on MacDrive or my actual Apple computer, it tells me "no errors were found.' And since it's Apple-formatted, disk defragmenter doesn't work on the Windows computer.

What's the best way to figure this out?

Thanks!

[The Weed]

I'm assuming here that any drive will become fragmented over time due to how the information is written to the drive.

Digidesign recommends you DO NOT defragment your audio drive. Rather, copy the data to another drive, format the audio drive, then copy the data back to the audio drive. Once you're sure the sessions are fine, delete the copy from the other drive.

You should also archive sessions from your audio drive when it is 50 to 75% full to free up space.

Cheers,