-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
Scanning and Performance
ClutterCutter picks the fastest scan method available for each drive.
On an NTFS drive, running as Administrator, ClutterCutter opens the raw volume (\\.\C:) and reads the Master File Table directly, then parses the records in parallel across your CPU cores. This is dramatically faster than walking the filesystem — a full C: drive of around two million files scans in roughly five seconds.
This is why ClutterCutter offers a one-click UAC relaunch on startup: elevation is what unlocks the MFT path.
When the MFT path isn't available — a non-NTFS drive, or running without elevation — ClutterCutter falls back to a FindFirstFileEx walker with LARGE_FETCH and a parallel fan-out across top-level folders. Slower than the MFT, but it works everywhere and still uses all your cores.
Scan all drives scans every fixed volume, each on its own worker thread (volumes are independent, so this is safe and the wall-clock time is about the slowest single drive, not the sum). Drives are appended to the "All drives" overview one at a time as they finish, so you see results immediately.
In MFT mode, hard-linked files (which WinSxS uses heavily) are counted once, by their canonical name. A tree-walking tool counts each path separately, so its totals can be higher. ClutterCutter's MFT total reflects what's actually consuming space on the disk.