2zee, it's not that ntfs fragments less, it;s that the os doesn't care if it's fragmented, the information in the masterfile table makes seek times less, and performance isn't hurt as much as it is with fat versus the same fragmentation.
anyway, you not being able to fill up the master file table is exactly what happens...the os does stop expanding the mft zone if it needs to stop expanding it
you did prove your point, that the mft zone growing and not deleting old mft looks like it's not unnesseccary, as with your settings, the mft didn't get fragmented even thoguh the mft zone can't grow, and old mft area is re used
here's the ms lowdown;
The NTFS file system contains at its core, a file called the master file table (MFT). There is at least one entry in the MFT for every file on an NTFS volume, including the MFT itself.
Because utilities that defragment NTFS volumes cannot move MFT entries, and because excessive fragmentation of the MFT can impact performance, NTFS reserves space for the MFT in an effort to keep the MFT as contiguous as possible as it grows.
MORE INFORMATION
NTFS uses MFT entries to define the files to which they correspond. 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.
(Directory entries, external to the MFT, also contain some redundant information regarding files. But a full discussion of all the structures on NTFS is beyond the scope of this article.)
As files are added to an NTFS volume, more entries are added to the MFT and so the MFT increases in size. When files are deleted from an NTFS volume, their MFT entries are marked as free and may be reused, but the MFT does not shrink. Thus, space used by these entries is not reclaimed from the disk.
Because of the importance of the MFT to NTFS and the possible impact on performance if this file becomes highly fragmented, NTFS makes a special effort to keep this file contiguous. NTFS reserves a percentage 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.
Volumes with a small number of relatively large files exhaust the unreserved space first, while volumes with a large number of relatively small files exhaust the MFT zone space first. In either case, fragmentation of the MFT starts to take place when one region or the other becomes full. If the unreserved space becomes full, space for user files and directories starts to be allocated from the MFT zone competing with the MFT for allocation. If the MFT zone becomes full, space for new MFT entries is allocated from the remainder of the disk, again competing with other files.
A new registry parameter was introduced in Service Pack 4 for Windows NT 4.0 that can increase the percentage of a volume that NTFS reserves for its master file table. NtfsMftZoneReservation is a REG_DWORD value that can take on a value between 1 and 4, where 1 corresponds to the minimum MFT zone size and 4 corresponds to the maximum. If the parameter is not specified or an invalid value is supplied, NTFS uses a default value of 1 for this parameter
how are you doing in that game thing you have going...are you numver one yet?
