Why You Should Also Strip The Short Filenames

Most users stop at disabling the creation of short filenames, but this only stops NTFS from creating new short filenames. All short filenames that were created before the feature was disabled remain in the system. This prevents you from receiving the full benefits of using only the long filename.

Now, you may be wondering just how much performance benefit you stand to gain from stripping the old short filenames from the system. You may even have read articles stating that any performance benefit would be minimal, if non-existent. After all, the short filenames have already been created, so why should they have any more negative effect on performance as long as new ones do not need to be created?

Well, Jose Barreto, a member of the File Server team at Microsoft investigated this and discovered the following results :

As you can see, disabling the 8.3 file name creation immediately improved the speed at which NTFS creates new files, but for you to benefit from 10x faster directory enumeration, you must strip off the old short filenames.

The Solid State Drive Optimization Guide

Using The Command Prompt

1. Open up the Command Prompt in Administrator mode. You can do this by searching for "cmd" and right clicking on it and select "Run as administrator".

2. Option A : Type "fsutil.exe 8dot3name strip /s C:" and press Enter. This is the safer method, because it avoids files whose short filenames are listed in the Registry. Removing those short filenames "may lead to unexpected application failures, including the inability to uninstall programs".

Please note that if there is even one file with a short filename that is listed in the Registry, fsutil will cancel the operation with the following error message :

The operation failed because registry entries refer to 8dot3 names in the specified path.

This normally occurs in the boot partition, particularly in the Program Files folder, so circumvent the Program File folders and apply the fsutil commands above to the other folders in the boot partition.

Credit for this finding and screenshot goes to Jeremy Choo from AmmoBox Studios.

Option B : Type "fsutil.exe 8dot3name strip /f /s C:" and press Enter. This removes all short filenames, even if they are listed in the Registry. This may lead to problems with the software you installed, especially their uninstallation, but will give you the best performance possible.

3. For the purpose of our demonstation, we are going to use Option B. After you press Enter, fsutil will scan the registry and report how many short filenames are listed in the Registry. Then it will begin to strip the short filenames from every file in the volume.

4. This will take a couple of minutes, especially if you have a lot of files in the volume, or have allowed NTFS to create short filenames for a long time. After fsutil is done stripping the short filenames, it will list the number of files and directories scanned and how many short filenames it found and stripped.

5. This only strips all short filenames from the C: volume. You will need to repeat this for every volume or drive in your system.

While this could take a while, the good news is that the effect is instantaneous - you do not need to reboot Windows.

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The Hard Disk Drive Performance Comparison Guide

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