You can determine the current size and fragmentation level of the MFT
on any drive by using the command-line Disk Defragmenter tool
(defrag.exe) along with the -a parameter, as described in ???A Defragmentation
Crash Course,??? earlier in this chapter. The numbers relating to
the MFT are shown at the end of the Volume Information report. Probably
the most interesting statistic here, though, is Percent MFT in use.
The higher the number, the less space the MFT has to grow (and it will).
The NtfsMftZoneReservation setting allows you to increase
the space reserved for the MFT. Although the default is 1,
values of 2 or 3 are probably better for most systems with
large hard disks; the maximum value of 4 is good for very
large drives with a lot of small files. Specify too small of a
value here, and the MFT will become fragmented more
quickly as it grows; too large of a value, and it will consume
(waste) too much disk space.
The problem is that changing this setting will not have any effect on
your drive??™s current MFT, but rather only influence its future growth.
For this reason, the earlier this value is increased in the life of a disk, the
better. To defragment or rebuild the MFT on your Windows drive,
you??™ll need to transfer your operating system to a new drive, as
described in the next section.
You??™ll need to restart Windows for any of these changes to take effect.
258 | Chapter 5: Performance
Transfer Windows to Another Hard Disk
Each new version of Windows consumes something like four times that of
its predecessor.
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