Defragmenting a conventional harddrive is to
-improve/restore file access times for fragmented files
-improve overall system performance since the HDD is the bottleneck in almost any system due to it’s mechanical nature.
-decrease drive wear and increase drive life and therefore in the long run, reduce hardware costs
-improve battery consumption [laptops]

Flash drives are not mechanical, and so are not affected by those drawbacks. Infact, a flash drive has a finite number of read/write cycles, so defragmenting those *may* possibly reduce their life some.

You can find the “winners” of “The Great Defrag Shootout” or check out the reviews of all the products mentioned.

Diskeeper is definitely not the best defrag program out there, and it’s by far the most expensive: up to $99! The home edition is $25, but you can get a full-featured version of PerfectDisk for under $40. My blog has a discount coupon for 20% discount, so you can get a “real” defragger for $32 instead of a partial one for $25. There are also some interesting and useful freeware utilities, so Diskeeper has got some real competiton on its hands.

The built-in Windows Defragger is based on DK, and it suffers from the same problem: when you disk gets loaded (i.e. 20% free space) it can’t cope and the disk gets more and more disorganised no matter how often you defrag, even with the “Set it and forget it” feature on.

Regarding the expansion of the MFT, it’s not necessary.

When an NTFS drive is formatted, it creates the $MFT and it contains a fixed number of records that can be used. As files are created, then these records are used. Eventually, the pre-allocated number of records is filled up and the $MFT needs to “grow” – allocating another chunk of file records. Immediately adjacent to the $MFT is created what is called the MFT Reserved Zone. By default, it is 12.5% of the drive. If you have a 100GB drive, then the Reserved Zone is going to be 12.5GB – pretty large if you think about it. If you look in Windows Explorer/Properties on a drive, the free space shown is the total of both INSIDE and OUTSIDE of the Reserved Zone.

The MFT Reserved Zone is created specifically to allow the $MFT to “grow” in a contiguous fashion. When the $MFT fills up, it allocates the space for its next group of file records from the free space located in the MFT Reserved Zone. NTFS will avoid putting files inside of the Reserved Zone unless you get into a low free space condition.

As long as a defragmenter, such as PerfectDisk, ensures that the MFT Reserved Zone is kept clear of files (a technically advanced defragmenter like PerfectDisk ensures that this takes place), then NTFS takes care of this automatically and there is no need to artificially extend the size of the MFT – which does nothing for you except take up disk space that can only be recovered by re-formatting the drive. In addition, with Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista, defragmenters have the ability to defragment the majority of the $MFT online – further reducing the likelihood that the $MFT will ever be significantly fragmented.

Thanks,
Joe Abusamra
Raxco Software