MFT Zone size problem, WHY does drive have TINY MFT?

[buBBles]

I have a question that NO ONE Anywhere seems to have a clue about:
MFT Zone size.

I recently bought some Western Digital drives, 2x1TB Black and 2x2TB Green. (WD1001FALS-00J7B1 & WD20EADS-00S2B0)

All appear to working fine, but when I backed up my 1TB Black to a 2TB Green (copied 800TB with GoodSync flawlessly) I went to defrag the drives and noticed in Diskeeper that my NEW 2TB Green drive has a TINY MFT Zone.

I formatted these drives with XP on default settings.
I read that the OS should expand the MFT by itself UP TO the limit (my OS is set to `2` in registry, limit = 12.5% of total drive) but, so far they haven`t changed.

For example:
On the new 2TB Green, (drive is 50% to capacity) it shows a MFT size of 11mb, 99% Full.

So I checked the original 1TB Black, (80% capacity) and it's MFT Zone size is 120mb and 87% full

This 1TB drive has had lots of data written to it / deleted from it before the back up - is that why there are so many more MFT files? MFT keeps record of deleted files?

Anyone know how the MFT zone size `should` work?! I am concerned and don't want to back up my files to these drives until I can figure this out, I do not want to risk losing TB's of data

Thanks

[hellnoire]

I think you might be wise to format the 2 TB one, then wipe the free space in it. I hear that rebuilds the MFT, though you'd be wise to back up your data bace to the 1 TB in the meantime.

[Alboguy]

Agree with hellnoire. Try to wipe the free space in it. But you can do this only with some third party software I guess, like Tracks Eraser.

[buBBles]

Thanks guys
I actually reformatted 2 of my WD Green 2TB drives with Paragon Hard Disk Manager™ 2010 Professional and set the 'sectors per cluster' to 16 up from the default of 8.

I read that my version of Diskeeper 10 has a special feature for defragmenting 'large volumes' but it doesn't work on drives with sector per cluster below 16, so i just reformatted them set at 16.

I then used CCleaner and did a 'wipe free space' which took a long time, but after using Goodsync to backup all the files to these drives yesterday, the MFT now seems perfect

Thanks for the tip, NO ONE, ANYwhere else I inquired had a clue, or even replied lol

PEACE

[hellnoire]

Hahah, not a problem. I was trying to figure out for the longest time what MFT was, until I googled it, and thought up that for a solution.

[Alboguy]

Nice to knoe that you fixed your problem buBBles! Yeah CCleaner can do that too...

[buBBles]

Actually, another question about 'sectors per cluster' settings...

One of these drives is for Audio files - 80,000 files, average file size is 9-10mb. (mostly large FLAC files not mp3)

The other drive is for video files - 10,000 files, average size 75mb

What is the *best* sector per cluster setting for these conditions?

My understanding is bigger files can use bigger sector per cluster, but nowhere did I find any details or examples.

Any ideas?

Thanks again

[hellnoire]

I just stick with the defaults myself, my suggestion would be to experiment to see what works for you. I'm no expert in hardware