When I look at the drive map of Defraggler, I see a large section that I would estimate is about 4 Gigs that is Reserved MFT space.
I am running XP Home. This is an older machine and I am running out of disk space. I will be forced to upgrade this machine at some point, but for now, what is this used for and is there a way to reclaim this?
As a side note that I think might be related, I also have about 4 Gigs dedicated to the swap file on this same partition.
Answer
The MFT (Master File Table) proper is the space on your hard drive the records where every file is stored on the drive.
Since it is generally a bad thing when the MFT becomes fragmented you will typically allocate a chuck of space much bigger than it needs so that it can grow without suffering from fragmentation - this is what the Reserved MFT space refers to.
It is not actually "used" space, and will be used as a last resort for your data. Taken from to this Microsoft KB Article:
The MFT Zone is not subtracted from available (free) drive space used for user data files, it is only space that is used last. When the MFT needs to increase in size, for example, you created new files and directories, it is taken from the MFT Zone first, thus decreasing MFT fragmentation and optimizing MFT performance.
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