Master File Table fragmentation

[!const]

Today I noticed that I have consumed almost 75-80% of my computer hard disk. I am having Windows XP installed on my computer and my hard drive is formatted to NTFS. Thus I am left with only 20% of hard disk space. I read somewhere that if you use more than 75% of hard drive then your master file table gets fragmented. The same thing happened to me. Now I am in doubt if it has some worse effects on your computer? Can Master File Table fragmentation cause slow down of my computer?

[samar69]

The Master File Table (MFT) is the area on an NTFS disk volume where the Windows operating systems keep all the information necessary for the operating system to retrieve files from the volume. There is at least one entry in the MFT for every file on an NTFS volume, including the MFT itself. The MFT also contains information such as the file creation, modification, and backup dates and times. All information about a file, including its size, time and date stamps, permissions, and data content is either stored in MFT entries or in space external to the MFT but described by the MFT entries. In essence, the MFT contains everything Windows needs to know about the files on the volume.

NTFS reserves 12.5 percent of the volume for exclusive use of the MFT until and unless the remainder of the volume is completely used up. Thus, space for files and directories is not allocated from this MFT zone until all other space is allocated first.

[Howitzer]

You can increase the size of the MFT as follows:

Run at Cmd line like FOR /L %f in (1,1,10000) do md %f
FOR /L %f in (1,1,50000) do echo Hey > %f {do not do this for your root directory like C drive}

This will create 10000 dir and 50000 files that you can delete and thus you can increase your MFT size.

[deoWo]

Master File Table size is dynamically defined and when it gets full, it expands automatically. Master File Table fragmentation is quiet normal, so don't worry. However if you want you can defragment Master File Table using a small freeware tool like Diskeeper or PageDefrag.