I found Sean Daily’s article about optimizing NTFS extremely useful in helping me understand and how NTFS volumes operate on a hard disk. I’m confused about Master File Table (MFT) placement on the disk. The author says creating a fresh NTFS volume places the MFT at the beginning of the disk and helps performance. I understand that scenario, and I also understand that when you install NT using Setup, NT converts the volume from FAT to NTFS (if you select the option of formatting to NTFS) and places the MFT wherever it finds free space. If you want to install NT into a volume so that the MFT is at the beginning of the volume and that placement doesn’t occur when you use Setup to install, how do you create such a volume before you install the OS?

--John McAtee



As you point out, even when you choose to format a volume as NTFS during the setup process, Setup always formats the target installation volume as FAT first. Later in the process, Setup converts the volume to NTFS. Unfortunately, there’s no way to bypass Setup’s temporary use of FAT—–at least, not until Windows 2000 (Win2K) comes along. Win2K will initially format the volume as NTFS.
Although negative behaviors that result from the MFT’s position with respect to the beginning of the disk are minimized because the volume is relatively empty during the setup process (the volume contains only the files related to Setup), you’re still better off installing NT onto a freshly formatted NTFS partition. One option you have under NT 4.0 is to format a partition as NTFS using another installation of NT. During installation, instruct Setup to leave the volume intact and not reformat it. In that case, the MFT will already be at the beginning of the disk from when the other installation of NT originally formatted the volume.

--Sean Daily

John McAtee 8/9/1999 10:57:13 AM

I thoroughly enjoyed Sean Daily’s “Optimizing NTFS” (March). I’m embarking on a conversion to Windows NT 4.0 from Novell, and I found the article very helpful in planning the migration. I have a question about performance enhancement when you compress NTFS volumes: What was the volume size of the data being compressed? I’ve noticed a reduction in performance when using compression. Although the CPU benchmark was lower, the overall performance was worse.

--CMS



In general, I’ve found performance enhancements on volume sizes less than 2GB. Performance gain was particularly significant on one workstation that used a 1GB SCSI disk. But each volume definitely has a threshold, beyond which any performance benefit from compression is negated. This situation results from the slower performance inherent with larger volumes and the increased overhead of managing large numbers of files and directories as the volume fills up.
Although you didn’t mention whether you were using SCSI or IDE disks in your experiments, I wouldn’t expect to see performance increases on IDE disks. This technology typically involves the host system’s CPU more than a comparable SCSI disk does, which in turn exacerbates the CPU utilization problem of NTFS compression and results in further performance reductions.

--Sean Daily

CMS 8/9/1999 10:55:06 AM