How to defrag Metafiles like $MFT on a USB drive?

How to defrag Metafiles like $MFT on a USB drive?
What can I use to defrag and relocate the metafiles on a NTFS USB drive?

Disktrix' Ultimate Defrag claims to do so, but, alas, this is certainly not the case.

 

Perfectdisk should defrag those files on just about any drive. Assuming we aren't talking about a flash drive, in which case it would be pointless. Otherwise it is only mostly pointless.

 

On my HDD partitions, NTFS 4k formatted, UD does defrag the MFT online, and should online defrag don't work, offtime works everytime. I had though some issues in the past having played with the MFT and some other utilities by Paragon. Only a file backup, re-format, and file restore solved this nasty issue.

The bottom line is : on a "regular" system, it does work.

And for a USB key, FAT(16/32) formatted most of the time, I wouldn't bother.

 

Rather my question should be, how can I change the reserved size of the MFT on a USB HARD DISK.

 

haha nice post, made me laugh

 

What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to reduce the MFT or are you trying to reserve empty MFT space so it will not fragment later? Diskeeper used to have such functions but I haven't used it in years so I don't know if it still does.

That's what I'm here for.

 

I'm looking to reduce the reserved size to about 300 megs or so. I'm also looking to remove the small files ntfs stores within the mft itself.

Normally Ultimate defrag would do what I want. It works fine on main system drives. The boot time module doesn't seem to work on drives interfaced through USB. Otherwise all is well.