25GB of my HD is "reserved for MFT"

[korkow]

I just downloaded O&O Defrag (wonderful program by the way) since I was kinda running out of Hard Drive space, and I noticed when I analyzed the drive, it showed that more than a 1/5th of my drive is reserved for MFT. Since my HD is 120GB, this means around 25GB of my drive is being reserved for MFT, which is completely pointless, since only upwards off 100MB is actaully being used for MFT right now. Since the MFT should be at about 1.5GB max, I REALLY want those 23.5 other Gigabytes back and I would like to know how to go about this.

EDIT: I just did an analasys of my drive and apparently a total of 58.5MB MFT is actaully being used...

[Old Hippie]

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The MFT is the heart of an NTFS partition. There is at least one entry in the MFT for every file on an NTFS volume. All the information about a file, including its' size, time and date stamps, permissions, data content, etc. are stored in the MFT (or in space described by the MFT).

To prevent fragmentation of the MFT, NTFS reserves space for the MFT in an effort to keep it as contiguous as it grows. This is important because defraggers can not move MFT records and fragmentation of the MFT can severely impact performance.

When you add files to an NTFS volume, entries are added to the MFT. When files are deleted from an NTFS volume, their MFT entries are marked as free and may be reused, but the MFT does not shrink. Thus, space used by these entries is not reclaimed from the disk.

NTFS reserves a percentage of the volume for exclusive use of the MFT. Space for files and directories will not be allocated from this MFT zone until all other space is allocated first. Depending on the average file size and other variables, either the reserved MFT zone or the unreserved space on the disk may be filled first. Volumes with a few large files will exhaust the unreserved space first, while volumes with a large number of small files will exhaust the MFT zone space first. When either the MFT zone or the unreserved space fills, fragmentation of the MFT starts. If the unreserved space becomes full, space for user files and directories will be allocated from the MFT zone. If the MFT zone becomes full, space for new MFT entries will be allocated from the remainder of the disk.

You can impact the amount of space NTFS reserves for the MFT by editing:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSyst em

Add Value name NtfsMftZoneReservation as a type REG_DWORD and set the data value. The valid range is 1 - 4.

Value: 1 12.5% of free space, default
Value: 2 25% of free space
Value: 3 37.5% of free space
Value: 4 50% of free space

NOTE: This is a run-time parameter and does not affect the format of a volume. It affects the way NTFS allocates space on all volumes. To be completely effective, this entry should in effect at the time you format a volume.

Good Luck!

[Waldorf]

Purchase Diskeeper. It allows you to resize your MFT and defrag it prior to booting.