Diskeeper and "Reserved System"

[yezhou]

I hope this is in the right forum...

Ok so when look at Diskeeper and the drive maps for my HDDs, I see a big chunk of it as "Reserved System (Green/White). A big chunk as in, the HDD is 120Gig and Diskeeper shows 7 "bars" in total, and the reserved system takes up nearly one entire bar...looks like around 80% of an entire bar.

To put this into perspective without a picture (I don't have anywhere to host it on ), my page file (yellow) is 512MB and its only like 1/30th of an entire bar.

Also these "Reserved System"...space...is only on my SATA HDDs (non-RAID), and there is none on my regular HDD.

Can anyone tell me if this is normal and what exactly this "Reserved System" space is and also why its so large?

Thanks in advance.

FYI:
----
Windows XP Pro SP2
Diskeeper 8
NTFS for all HDDs
System Restore OFF
Indexing Service OFF

 

[yezhou]

Anyone? ... Bueller? Bueller?

 

[Chunkee]

dont know about this one, have you checked on the diskeeper forums

jC

 

[dawks]

Im not sure myself, kind of curious actually.

But I believe it has to do with the nature of NTFS, and its MFT. NTFS needs to reserve some space on the partition for itself.. But Im not sure if thats all of that "Reserved Space".

 

[SUOrangeman]

Probably has a lot to do with the MFT. If I am not mistaken, the Mast FAT Table actually has the first few bytes of a file and then a pointer to the rest of the file. I want to say that MS's thinking on the matter is that the convention of the MFT makes things a little faster since parts of the file are actually in the partitions "table of contents." I'm sure there are many files that can be completely contained within the MFT.

-SUO

 

[Byte]

MFT is like system restore or pagefile where it allocates certain percent, i think its like 12% default, and grows automatically like the pagefile. This area isn't touched by any defragging programs. (you should see the area on a 400GB