MFT Size too big

[jc64]

I have a W2K server (proxy server) which reads and writes many small files daily. It has a pair of 9GB drives with a hardware mirror. I noticed that the free drive space was slowly shrinking and could not find the culprit until I analyzed the drive using Disk Defragmenter. The MFT is taking up 3.6GB of the drive! I understand that the MFT can grow and grow but had no idea it could gobble up 40% of a drive. I am planning to add another drive with small cluster size to use for the intense read/writes of the small files but would like to shrink the MFT of the original drives.

Does anyone know of a utility to shrink or resize MFTs?

 

[prospector48]

Microsoft has an article on how the MFT works at

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q174619

It is my understanding that the MFT has been designed to be able to write files within it on the space not being used by MFT entries.

If it is still a problem, I think you would have to backup the data and reformat the disk.