NDFF is command-line utility that performs extra fast file searching on local NTFS partition. It looks for file directly in MFT, which lets avoid reading all the directories contained on the volume.

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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.

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