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Why is my MFT toward inside of disk?

Comdrpopnfresh

Comdrpopnfresh

Golden Member
I was planning on using ultimatedefrag to consolidate my most used files to outer tracks, move directories near the MFT, and move archives to inner tracks. However, the MFT on my drive appears to be a quarter of the radial length from the center. Why would it be like this to begin with- am I losing some possible room for performance gain? If so, is there any way to change it?
 
Anyone? I'm thinking maybe the only way to rectify this is to reformat and reinstall, which leads me to also think that restoring a backup or image of my current OS would not be doable.
Because my main drive is partitioned (I created an OS partition about 150GB in size and the rest went to a storage partition), could defrag utilities be misrepresenting the position of data on visual representations because they portray a partition rather than the full disk?
 
There a second copy of the first 16 records contained in the MFT. It's stored mid-volume. Maybe you are seeing that.
 
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It seems that the MFT is placed at 3 GB from the start of a volume when formatted using Windows Vista or Windows 2003. We had just tested it with 750GB, 500GB, and 8GB volumes with default cluster size setting. However, if the MFT needs to be expanded, additional segments may be placed throughout the disk.
 
Comdrpopnfresh said:
However, the MFT on my drive appears to be a quarter of the radial length from the center.
Click to expand...

How do you know that?

Does the defragger's logical volume map directly correspond to the physical layout of the data on the disk? The physical drive comprises of several platters/surfaces on which data is written as decided by the HDD's firmware (and not the defragger/filesystem which are abstracted from the physical disk) while the logical volume map is usually 2-D. How can the defrag utility reflect the 3-D distribution of data on a 2-D map accurately?

What if the drive was a SSD? Would the drive map still show a radial layout with 'tracks'?

In short, don't worry about manual file 'placement', just ensure that the filesystem is not heavily fragmented, and get on with actually using the computer rather than micromanaging the HDD.

Since I started using automatic defraggers on my XP systems a couple of years ago, I've never bothered with manual disk 'tweaking' of any kind. Not worth the time and trouble.
 
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