MFT needs defragging ... !?

[confus-ed]

MFT (Master File Table) seems to have several fragments (35) .... machine is sluggy to start - over a minute & generally iffy running for what it is ..... this particular PC gets stuff put on & off all the time & it has a stunning 100,000 odd files on it (...or it did ) !!!.... soooo I've decided that's the problem ... but how do I do it !?!?!

Defrag leaves it alone, I take it I need something like Diskeeper .... can anyone point me to a free tool that does it ?

I've search-ed MS KB but all I found was this really useful statement .... Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 303079

Currently, only third-party defrag utilities consolidate unused MFT FRS records and reclaim unused MFT allocated space

Uncle bill strikes again....

[Matridom]

windows defragmenter is created by executive software (Creators of diskeeper)

Diskeeper is far better and worth the money.

However, they DO have a free 30 day trial download that you could use. For something like this, i would trust no other program.

[confus-ed]

Okay so I went & got the trial of diskeeper ... ran it ... several 'ages' later I get it finnished ... still 4 MFT fragments ... ran again ... several more 'ages' .... still 4 mft fragments .... but its only 57% full ?

WTF? This seems 'most bogus' !!

Lets see, first NTFS munches 1/8 of my disk for the flipping MFT (oh yeah that's not much overhead for a file system is it!?) & then it refuses to even get it all in one file even when I go get another utility to sort it out....

So being 'mad' at it, I backed up the whole volume onto a.n.other machine, ghosted on a new setup (with only one MFT file !!!) .... restored all the files from my backup and then looked at the MFT .... Ta-Da !!! only one MFT fragment.... & a vast improvement (even over the halfway point with 4 fragments)....

Strikes me this is absolute pants ! So I went hunting around the building looking at all the machines here, variously there are between 0-35 fragments (I had found the 'worst') but it looks like I have a new job ... running endless backups/restores to get rid of this .... Arrrrrgh! this was one of the justifications for 'upgrading' to xp/2000 .... wipes egg from face & goes off to sulk !

[confus-ed]

Mmmmm .... still not happy with this .... having done the backup/restore trick a couple of times I was using a lot of time up... but I was getting happy users - so I persisted ... I found another utility by Raxco - PerfectDisk 2000 which defragged the MFT straight away - not as good as Diskeeper at actually defragging the rest of the file system, but it did its stuff with MFT fragments....

But the hard way (backup/restore) still seemed to produce substantially 'faster' machines !!?? So as ever I was confus-ed .... until I discovered that the MFT never ever shrinks - WTF? Top design feature I thinkee NOT !

So when you are setting up a machine for the first time and adding all those applications that create tens of thousands of temp files this makes the MFT grow & grow, it doesn't matter that you then delete those files, a new MFT entry has been created, ok it can get used again later but what if I don't want or need to use it later ?? Every time I want to access a file the machine reads the MFT & then spends ages skipping all those 'old' entries until it finds a valid entry ... if this was a database every administrator would be laughing at me telling me to just re-create the table .. which is what I guess I am doing with the backup/restore trick ... no doubt there's a valid reason why windoze is designed this way, but it strikes me as pants!

So anyways I now have a host of machines with only one MFT fragment (well there'll be two - 'cos there are two copies) and none of them appear so full, before they averaged 50-80% full, now they average 25-40% full...

So yet another reason if you are a home user & don't need the security aspects of NTFS to stick with FAT....