Reserved system space?

[zulu]

My two USB2 hard drives both, according to *Diskeeper* have a sizeable chunk
of *Reserved System Space*
On the assumption that System Restore was responsible, I disabled it for
both these drives. I then transferred the contents of the smaller 250Gb
drive to the larger 500Gb one.
I then formatted the empty drive (not quick format) as it was i.e.NTFS , 512
sectors.

Diskeeper _still_ shows the same unusable volume...

What is going on here?
How can I recover this space?
....should I leave well alone even? (why?)

 

[Shenan Stanley]

My two USB2 hard drives both, according to *Diskeeper* have a
sizeable chunk of *Reserved System Space*
On the assumption that System Restore was responsible, I disabled
it for both these drives. I then transferred the contents of the
smaller 250Gb drive to the larger 500Gb one.
I then formatted the empty drive (not quick format) as it was
i.e.NTFS , 512 sectors.

Diskeeper _still_ shows the same unusable volume...

What is going on here?
How can I recover this space?
...should I leave well alone even? (why?)

What size is this "sizeable chunk" in realistic (numerical) terms?

 

[John John]

My two USB2 hard drives both, according to *Diskeeper* have a sizeable chunk
of *Reserved System Space*
On the assumption that System Restore was responsible, I disabled it for
both these drives. I then transferred the contents of the smaller 250Gb
drive to the larger 500Gb one.
I then formatted the empty drive (not quick format) as it was i.e.NTFS , 512
sectors.

Diskeeper _still_ shows the same unusable volume...

What is going on here?
How can I recover this space?
...should I leave well alone even? (why?)

It's quite probably the NTFS MFT zone. Because MFT fragmentation can
degrade performance the file system preemptively reserves a large
contiguous block for the MFT when the drive is formatted. This space
isn't lost, it will be used if needed. If the disk runs out of space
for files the file system will relent and yield space for the files from
the MFT zone. The opposite is also true, if the MFT zone fills up it
will take space from the available (free) disk space for its needs, the
problem there is that the MFT will become fragmented and the built in
disk defragmenter will not be able to defragment it. Also note that
small files of 1KB or less are stored in the MFT. You can change the
default MFT zone reservation if you want:

How NTFS reserves space for its Master File Table (MFT)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/174619/en-us

If I were you I wouldn't keep 512 byte sectors, it imposes a heavy
overhead on the file system, unless all or most of the files on the disk
are tiny (512 bytes or less) you shouldn't use such small clusters, it
would be better to stick with the standard 4k clusters.

John

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

I agree with John John's opinion that it is reserved by NTFS. This would be
normal behavior.

 

[zulu]

OK, nw I understand why *Properties* didn't see the *missing" space.
I will reformat the now empty drive to 4kb sectors, but the other (larger
one) will have to stay as it is, 512, as I have nowhere to move all the
conyents to!

Thank you all

--
¦zulu¦

I agree with John John's opinion that it is reserved by NTFS. This would
be normal behavior.