Large Mft - can this be reduced

Hello world and fellow geek-aholics,


Just have a brief querry, noted when using ultimate defrag, this defragger is the one of the best free ones imo very versatile and shutdown on completion option ..nice, that my 320gb hdd has a large amount of mft files (this drive has only videos, photo and snapshots) on it., which i should probably put to the center of the drive but havent.

Appreciate there is purpose for these but are there residule enties from files that have been deleted? Can the Mft be cleaned up? If so how?

Thanks in advance.:wave

Tip of the day
If using an old 98/98se unit dont use Bitdefender 10 free - Ten minutes almost to open a blank publisher doc..omg...no malware and cleaned temp files deleted files permanently from recycle bin and defragged even and Hdd file sytem 32bit more than enough virtual ram no bad Hdd sectors and drive passed diagnostics even if a little old....:zzz

 

Hi necro61

I'm interested in this question as well.

I had the same thing, a very large MFT on a drive that only had a few large video files and couldn't figure out why. I read a few links from google and the consensus was don't worry about it. The MFT reserves space for Windows use, but as space on the drive is consumed by other files Windows allows the MFT space to be used for file storage. So the MFT is not wasted space just reserved until absolutely needed by non Windows files.

What I find interesting is that the other day I noticed that my MFT on this drive is now very small (more like I would think appropriate for a drive with only 2-3 dozen files). I hadn't reformatted the drive or made any changes, other than adding and deleting large files, but the MFT dramatically changed size. So anyone have any insights on MFT?

 

Thanks for the info tip Sach2,

This leads me to another querry -

Does this mean that these files or free / reserved space also gets defragged even though in essence there is nothing in here? thus increasing a defrag time frame?

Is it potentialy a windows backup like copy of all the files or similar.. just not able to be accessed by a user just the operating system??

Appreciate any info on this just trying to figure out what it actualy does? im aware it stands for master file table..master files? other than that, the workings and precise reason for it alludes me at this time..:confused

 

Hi guys recent update on mft well further info at least...

Was using my fav defragger called the "Ultimate Defrag"..try it youll like it.
O&O or OO is another defragger I hear good things about, Ultimate Defrag has a free version..not sure about O&O or double O is it..?

I noted this unit had been a bit sluggish and sure enough a stick of ram hadnt been reseated correctly...gosh:-o

Anyways I was looking at the content layout of a cloned drive, and had noted that the "space reserved for mft" was now on the inner slower part of the disc of the drive - a pictorial representation of the file layout was on screen.
Where in the master image the mft was on the outter edge of the disc. I think the difference in ram from master to imaged unit caused this to be written to a different (slower) local during the imaging process.

After shutting down and re-seatting the ram, for a total of 512Mb, I again went back to the Ultimate defrag...and everything had tightened up considerably the mft was still there in a similar position, but the space reserved for mft (default yellow) was no where to be seen?? there were several rings of it shown previously...l8r:wave

 

Microsoft have this freeware, that can do some additional defragging. It's excellent: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx

Give it a run...

 

Don't mess with the MFT! If it gets corrupted, you lose everything on the drive.
It's the single most important file on an NTFS volume. Windows manages the MFT as required. There are no performance gains from messing with it. Only if it is fragmented (> 3-4 fragments) does it need to be bothered with, and all that you need to do is make sure it's defragmented.

The defrag utility I use- the excellent Diskeeper 2009 Pro has a feature to proactively enlarge the reserved zone if it feels that there is a chance of it getting fragmented. It also defrags most of the MFT without needing a boot-time defrag. But there is no way to shrink the reserved zone, or the actual MFT itself, AFAIK. Files can be written into the reserved zone when the drive space is running low, and can be moved out of there later by a defragger during a defrag (if there is sufficient space elsewhere). This has the effect of practically 'shrinking' it in a way, but it's all a worse case scenario when your drive is > 85% full.

And importantly, the file system (or the defragger, or any other Windows utility) can specify the 'placement' of the file only within the logical disk, not the actual physical disk. Only the HDD drive controller/firmware decides which physical blocks to use when writing a file to the drive. So don't waste time on placing files around on the logical disk...it may or may not correspond to the equivalent locations on the physical disk.

To reiterate, just leave the MFT alone

 

I second the use of Diskeeper Pro as per Deckard's post.

 

It really doesn't matter what defragger you use. They all need Sysinternal's extra program as a supplement anyway. I use

- Sysinternal's pagefile defragger from Microsoft
- the build-in one from Microsoft
- Defraggler from Piriform

 

Sysinternals is required only for defragging the page file; you don't need to use it with Diskeeper full versions (*not* the DK lite).

Diskeeper has that feature built-in: it will defrag the pagefile when you specify a boot-time defrag.

IMHO, just one defragger is suffficient (aside from pagefile defragging).....defraggers have different algorithms and hence a different idea of what passes for a fragmented/unfragmented/optimized disk, so one might tend to undo the work of the other by moving files around needlessly.

 

Perfect Disk 10 is the only program that can defrag $mft files. Some offline/reboot defrag thing. It's expensive but there's a 30 day free trial. Also here's Microsoft about the master file table: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/320397/en-us

 

There are atleast three defraggers (the major ones) - Diskeeper, O&O and Perfectdisk that defrag the $MFT. There might be others too, but they are all commercial utilities AFAIK; none of the freeware utilities defrag the MFT*.

Diskeeper 2007/08/09 defrags most of the MFT during a 'normal' defrag i.e without requiring a boot-time defrag. The remaining few records of the MFT are defragged during a boot-time defrag.

* The XP defragger does not, but the Vista defragger actually defrags most (?) of the MFT...this is why using the freeware defrag utilities is not necessarily better than using Vista's own defragger!

 

Hey people,:-D

Thanks to all whom have replied and for the heads up and enlightining my knowledge base, really appreciate all the comments and links made so far.wave