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I used Diskeeper Pro, and after a fragment, it said I should increase the size of the MFT. Here is a screen shot:
Anyone ever adjust this setting? From the screen shot, most of the MFT's are over 90% except for drive D at 75%.
I don't know if the standard defrag program that comes with XP does the same, but Diskeeper said that the C drive was heavily fragmented, while the standard one that comes with XP said it was OK. The recommendation from Diskeeper was to increase the size of the MFT to avoid fragmentation.
Never and I would be very leery of doing that. I see no need.
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“The Government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.” - Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez
That might explain why Diskeeper will increase the size and defrag it to improve performance. I never noticed this until I had to defrag one of my drives that uses the program Newsleecher. This program keeps track of thousands of header files in it's internal cache. Every time I update the headers, I always have to defrag according to Diskeeper since it's usually over 10% fragmented.
Just curious if anyone has. On this spare rig in the garage, I did let Diskeeper change it as suggested.
i read somewhere that the builtin defrag in xp is really the best to use, but that was a while back. i am kind of wary of diskeeper since they send me marketing emails way too much.
I've been reading more about this on the net, and it's been an option since Diskeeper versin 5. Here is more info:
Diskeeper and Master File Table (MFT) Fragmentation
Its been said a number of times that MFT fragmentation can considerably slow performance. Lets take a closer look at why this is so, and how Diskeeper restores performance lost to MFT fragmentation.
The Master File Table (MFT) is the heart of the NTFS file system. It is essentially an index to all of the files on an NFTS volume, containing the file name, a list of file attributes, and a pointer to the file. The data for each file is contained in one record in the MFT, called the "file record". If a file is fragmented, then more than one pointer is required - one for each fragment, in fact. When the file system accesses a file, it must first go through the MFT to obtain the location of that file, or the location of that files various fragments, as well as that file's various attributes.
As one might surmise, an added MFT performance barrier occurs just due to regular file fragmentation. In that the file system must access the MFT and obtain the location of every single file fragment AND THEN locate the file
fragments themselves, there is a lot of "double work" involved.
But how does the MFT itself get fragmented, and what can be done about it?
First, it should be said that NTFS has a built-in feature which, under some conditions, prevents MFT fragmentation from occurring. The MFT is created with a pre-allocated expansion space into which it can expand without
fragmenting. There are a couple of conditions, however, under which MFT fragmentation does occur, one of them being very common.
Converting FAT to NTFS
The most common way the MFT gets fragmented is when a FAT partition is converted to NTFS. A FAT partition is converted to NTFS when such a conversion is needed or desired, but it also occurs automatically during Windows NT installation, if the NTFS format is chosen. The partition created during installation is a FAT partition, and even if the NTFS format is chosen during installation, the partition is still created as FAT, and only converted to NTFS after the first boot.
When a FAT partition is converted to NTFS, an MFT is created. If there is a large enough contiguous free space, the MFT is made contiguous, with contiguous pre-allocated expansion space. However, since the MFT itself plus the pre-allocated expansion space comprises about 12% of the partition, there is usually not enough contiguous free space and the MFT is created fragmented.
Full or Heavily Fragmented Disks or Partitions
We covered the subject of the MFTs pre-allocated space above. There is a caveat to the MFT pre-allocated space, however. NTFS, having been developed to efficiently use every bit of space on a disk or partition, will utilize the
pre-allocated MFT space for normal files if the disk or partition becomes full or heavily fragmented. Simply said, if the disk runs out of regular space for files or file fragments, NTFS will turn to the MFTs pre-allocated space and
begin writing files and file fragments to this space.
When this occurs, the MFT can only expand by continuing its growth in another space on the disk, a space not adjacent to the MFT. Thus MFT fragmentation begins, as when that space runs out, another space will have to be found, and so on.
Effect of MFT Fragmentation on Performance
When the MFT is fragmented, access to directories and files slows down tremendously as the file system works its way through the fragmented MFT to access the pointers and file attributes necessary to access every file. Combined with regular file fragmentation, this is a performance nightmare - the file system has to make multiple I/Os to access the MFT, AND THEN multiple
I/Os to access the file itself.
Before Diskeeper 5.0, there was no way to safely defragment the MFT, as it is not safe to move online, while the disk or partition is live and in use. Hence, one could defragment a disk or partition and clean up regular
fragmentation, but MFT fragmentation would remain. (The author has personal experience with a medium-used disk which was regularly defragmented, yet ended up with an MFT in over 9,000 fragments. Before Diskeeper 5.0, nothing could be done about it, and simply opening Windows Explorer would take two to three minutes.)
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So now I'm wondering of the file indexing service is part of this MFT, and it's used to locate files. I have it disabled on both my rigs, and never really noticed a performance hit.
I get the same message you do when I use Diskeeper on my C drive about optimizing my MFT, but I feel that things like this really shouldn't be tampered with. I feel the same way about paging files. Lot's of suggestions out there but I think the best thing is to use the Windows recommended size. My only concession is that I prefer a static size paging file (manually set the min and max size the same) and I do this the first time AFTER disabling the paging file and defragging the drive so that the paging file is written on contigous clusters on the drive.
As concerns Defragging, for 99% of the people out there Windows defrag is all they need. Your average Joe who just browses and types letters can get away with never defragging a NTFS partition in 5 years.
Deleting a lot of files (or changing the size on a lot of files) is what causes fragmentation, and the average casual user just doesn't do much to fragment a drive very much.
There are exceptions. Some apps DO cause a drive to be fragmented. Video editing for instance causes massive fragmentation and your editing drive should be a dedicated partition for this reason.
Window's defragger is adequate, but it has an annoying habit of not filling in the holes. Also it has a problem defragging certain drives that have a lot of large files and is less that 20% empty.
Just had a client's machine on my bench that had the worst fragmentation I've ever seen and Windows defrag just wouldn't do much with it. Out came Diskeeper.
I don't like to have any unnecessary services running on my main system but I decided to install Diskeeper because it does so much better a job, and it's so fast.
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“The Government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.” - Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez
I use Newsleecher and it fragments my C drive really bad. I have to run it every time I update my groups. I've been thinking about moving it over to another partition or drive to avoid fragmentation. I might even consider an external drive so I don't mess with my 3 HD's that I already have.
I have adjusted the MFT on my spare rig in the garage twice now as I use the same program on it which creates lots of files and fragmentation. Haven't really noticed any difference after increasing it except that the fragmentation seems to be not as bad.
