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Master File Table fragmentation

T

The Hockster

Gawd
Joined
Oct 27, 2002
Messages
909
I have a 120GB WD 8MB drive. My system is NTFS and I have used 94GB and have only 17 GB left: that's 15% free space.

Now I read somewhere that if you use more than 75-85% of a drives capacity then your master file table gets fragmented. This has now happened to me. In Disk Defragmenter it reads:

Total folders: 2051
Fragmented folders: 45
Excess folder fragments: 206

Total MFT size: 45MB
MFT record count: 42216
Percent MFT in use: 90
Total MFT fragments: 3

Is this bad? Will this slow down my system a lot? What else does this mean? I have already noticed that with my main "Files" folder on system which has all my files (music, videos, and pictures) in other than the system and programs when I go to properties on it it now reads the size and how many files are in it incorrectly. It says there is only 31GB in there when there is actually 85GB in there. I think I noticed it started reading it incorrectly when I recently downloaded a large 750MB file and put it in there. I guess that was the file that triggered the fragmentation in my master table. Does that sound right?

I'm pretty sure my whole system has been a little slower also lately, when loading programs for the first time or even when opening some folders in Windows - a lot less snappy than it used to be. Is this all because of the master table been fragmented?

Anyway, I guess now I have to try to sort this problem. So basically whenever you buy a hard drive you can never go over 75% of its capacity?!?! That's stupid... I'm just wondering is it better to have like 5000 files all in one folder or to have them in hundreds of smaller folders? Does having more files/folders increase the chances of master file table fragmentation? I just want to learn how to prevent this form happening again.
 
Well yes and no.
The more data you put on a drive the slower it is, whether that has ANYTHING to do with the MFT is beyond me. I'm sure it does, but I'd wager that's a smaller part of it then the drive getting nearly full.
I usually always watch the space on my boot drive on my main machine (usually doesn't get over half full), but I let my storage drives on my server go to 90% before I start messing with them (they're also defragged weekly because of all the writing - I've actually managed to fragment one 15% in 4 days).
It's not that you can't use that space, it's just that the more you use, the slower the drive gets. That's always the way drives have been.
 
MFT for C: - 4/6GB consumed
Master File Table (MFT) fragmentation
Total MFT size = 18,448 KB
MFT record count = 18,432
Percent MFT in use = 99 %
Total MFT fragments = 2


MFT for D: - completely empty 11GB
Master File Table (MFT) fragmentation
Total MFT size = 1,918 KB
MFT record count = 49
Percent MFT in use = 2 %
Total MFT fragments = 2

This is normal, the MFT isn't supposed to be defraged, anyway. Most of the time the almost the entire MFT will be in memory, so read performance is almost always high. Writes can be a little more ugly, but it's not an issue.
 
Well my hard drive is definitely slower the last few weeks after I've been downloading a number of big files. Do hard drives normally get slower as you fill them up, as files are scattered around different part of the drive (inner and outer), perhaps? For example, when I first formatted my HDD and ran PCMark2002 I got a HDD score of 1132...a few weeks later after it was more full I got a score of about 800. Now I get a score of 600!

I used to think that if you filled your HDD up with say 100GB of normal data files, and still had 20GB left, then it would still run at the same speed as if all those files were not there and you had 120GB free space. I seem to be very wrong... By the way, I haven't go any spyware or other nasties on my system, it's very clean.
 
Originally posted by The Hockster
Do hard drives normally get slower as you fill them up, as files are scattered around different part of the drive (inner and outer), perhaps?
Click to expand...

Hard drives get slower as you fill them up in general.
Defragmenting helps, but it will still be slower than it was with less data on it.

Lets say you partition 40GB of an 80GB drive. This 80GB drive has one platter (which isn't exactly common, but just for example).
It will still be slower if you fill up 30GB of that 40GB even though it's only on one general area of the drive (the first half, the second half, or even just in the middle.) Data creates overhead.

That's the general reason to having one boot/apps/games drive and one drive for data storage like most people on here seem to do :)
 
Yeah, I've been wanting to buy a new drive for a while now. I was thinking of buying a WDC 250GB simply for storing all my files on...or perhaps a 160GB one if I don't fee like spenidng all my money in one go. Then I could have my 120GB hard drive just for the system, apps and games, just as you said. That should speeds things up anyway.
 
The drives themselves do not speed up or slow down with varying amounts of data. What has problems is the filesystem on them. When using a modern OS with a filesystem that requires permission bits, access logging/auditing, large/wide data structures to address them, and journaling, you start needing far more random accesses during normal operations. If you want to access a single file you need to find where it is on the disk, go there, check to see if you can even access it, record the access, then find all the pieces of the file and deliver them to the user. Also, don't forget that different OSes do different things. Windows, for example, will do helpful things like index all the files and their contents in the background. I hope it's a little more clear now that demands on drives continue to increase, mainly in the need for more random accesses. The catch is that ATA drives aren't getting faster at performing those random accesses.
 
Well, if you're worried about the MFT being fragmented. Best solution is Defragment it.

Defrag that comes standard with windows can't defragment it. but programs such as O&O defrag does.

Worth a try.
 
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