mtsuite

mtsuite is a collection of disk utilities for Windows, optimized for high performance on Solid State Drives (SSD).

Each program in the collection

• Uses all the available CPU cores to achieve maximum disk throughput, making it typically much faster than other disk utilities, espcecially when run on Solid State Drives (SSD).

• Supports long paths, i.e. paths greater than 260 characters.

• Supports Symbolic Links.

Included utilities

The 4 programs included are

• mtdel: deletes a directory recursively. This is much faster than using Windows Explorer or even rmdir /s /q.

• mtcopy: copies a source directory recursively to a destination directory. This is similar to using XCOPY /S or ROBOCOPY /S.

• mtmir: same as mtcopy, except extra files not present in the source are deleted from the destination. This is similar to ROBOCOPY /MIR.

• mtinfo: displays file system statistics of a directory: number of files, number of subdirectories, size, etc. This can be 20x faster than using the Properties menu in Windows Explorer to find the size of a folder.

Symbolic Links support

A File Symbolic Link is a special file on disk that points to a another file in a different location on disk (the "target"). When reading the "contents" of a symbolic link, Windows actually reads the contents on the target file.

Similarly, a Directory Symbolic Link is a special file on disk that points to another directory on disk (the "target"). When enumerating files in a directory symbolic link, Windows actually enumerates files from the target directory.

In both cases, what is stored on disk by Windows for Symbolic Links is

• The type of link (file/directory)
• The path to the target file/directory, either as an absolute or relative path. A relative path is relative to the location of the link itself.

File and Directory Symbolic Links have been available since Windows Vista.

Example

Suppose we have the directory structure below and we want to copy it into another directory, let's say c:\test-copy.

c:\test (directory)
  foo (directory)
    bar.rlink.txt (symbolic link to "..\bar.txt")
  foo2 (directory)
      foo.link (symbolic link to "..\foo")
  bar.txt (file)

Both XCOPY /S and ROBOCOPY /MIR will copy the target of the symbolic links, so the result of a copy would be:

c:\test-copy (directory)
  foo (directory)
    bar.rlink.txt (file, same content as "c:\test\bar.txt")
  foo2 (directory)
      foo.link (directory, same content as c:\foo)
        bar.rlink.txt (file, same content as "c:\test\bar.txt")
  bar.txt (file)

So, in essence, Symblic Links have been "expanded" to their target content, and are not Symbolic Links anymore in the new copy.

With mtcopy and mtmir, Symbolic Links are copied as links, not as their target contents, so the end result of running the command

mtcopy c:\test c:\test-copy

will be:

c:\test-copy (directory)
  foo (directory)
    bar.rlink.txt (symbolic link to "..\bar.txt")
  foo2 (directory)
      foo.link (symbolic link to "..\foo")
  bar.txt (file)

Coming soon:

• Benchmarks