NDFF is command-line utility that performs extra fast file searching on local NTFS partition. The main advantage over any other file searching tool currently available (including the one found in Windows Explorer) that it looks for file directly in MFT, which is system data table of NTFS. This approach lets avoid reading all the directories contained on the volume, thus speeding up the operation by many times. For example, my 30 GB large partition full of files and directories is scanned in less than 10 seconds, while it takes several minutes to scan it in traditional way.
The main disadvantage of the approach is that the tool cannot look for the file in directory subtree. NTFS partition is the only scope understood by it. Of course, the utility could have filtered out the files that are not located in subtree of interest, but this did not decrease the time to scan the scope wanted. In other words, file search time depends only on number of files located on partition, and cannot be decreased by any hint from user.
This makes the utility useful for searching the files that user does not have an idea where they
could have been placed of. On the other hand, it is not efficient to find the files that are known
to be located in a dozen or two of subdirectories.
Currently, the prerelease version 0.9.6 is available.
New features are listed in release history.
Permanent link to Portable Application Description of the latest version: http://ndff.hotbox.ru/ndff.pad.xml.
The utility is still at work. Note that I spend my own free time developing it and I am not going to get any profit from it. So please be patient if you wanted new version to be released and new features to be included.
Moreover, the utility required thorogh testing, and you can contribute to it. Since version 0.9.6, there is a separate utility called 'ndfftest' available. When run (with a drive name specified as parameter), it scans the directory structure in traditional way, just like all other programs do, including Windows Explorer. Then, it scans the drive using the same method as NDFF and compares the results. All the mismatches are logged in a file that is placed besides the ndfftest and is called ndfftest.log. After the scan is complete, you can check the log file to make sure whether there are any mismatches or not. The link to ndfftest is at the same page with NDFF itself.
Anyway, I would gladly appreciate any feedback from you.
Contact me: ndff@hotbox.ru
| [Main Page] | [Release History & Downloads] | [FAQ] | [Documentation] | [Links] |
Copyright © 2004, 2005 Alexey Birioukov. All rights reserved.