Master File Table (MFT)
What is Master File Table (MFT) ?
MFT stands for Master File Table.
MFT is nothing but a table which contain detail information about each and every file and folder on a NTFS partition like a relational database table in SQL.
MFT is at central of NTFS and acts as a starting point of NTFS operations.
NTFS creates a record in MFT immediately for a file or folder that has been created newly.
minimum size of a record = 1024 bytes
maximum size of a record = 4096 bytes
The information stored in MFT of each file is in the form of attributes of it. The biggest attribute of MFT is the “data attribute” as this attribute is nothing but the actual data present in the file.
Hence size of a MFT record is nothing but the sum of all attributes including data.
Operating system reserves some space for MFT which is called as MFT Zone, no any other file can occupy this space on disk.
In case of small files, it store everything in MFT record hence no need to store it separately on disk which in turn reduces disk read and write operations in turn helps to improve performance.
Following are the different attributes of MFT :
Header (H) : hold information about site pointer and available space within records.
File Name Attribute (FN) : store the name of file.
Data Attribute (Data) : store actual contenet, data of file.
Standard Information Attribute (SI) : hold standard information about stored files like time of created, modified and accessed.
Security Descriptor Attribute (SD) : host information about file security, access control, permissions etc.
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