Yes, 12.5% is as low as you can go.
However, here's something to consider that will trip you out. If you intend to install lots of programs on the system, the MFT utilization could be very high. This could cause the MFT to become badly fragmented, and as a result, the fragmentation could cause a rather significant system slow down. In this situation, it may actually be beneficial to <i>increase</i> the percentage, to say, 25%! This will help the MFT records stay contiguous.
Why?
Depending on the average file size and other variables, either the reserved MFT zone or the unreserved space on the disk may be used up before the other as the disk fills to capacity.
Volumes with a small number of relatively large files will exhaust the unreserved space first, while volumes with a large number of relatively small files will exhaust the MFT zone space first. In either case, fragmentation of the MFT starts to take place when one region or the other becomes full. If the unreserved space becomes full, space for user files and directories will start to be allocated from the MFT zone -- competing with the MFT for allocation. If the MFT zone becomes full, space for new MFT entries will be allocated from the remainder of the disk, again competing with other files.
This might sound nutty to you, and maybe even alarming, when you consider how much space can be (and already has been) reserved for the MTF zone on that new hard drive, but that's how NTFS works. The MFT is the core of an NTFS partition, and there's no changing this aspect of the file system.
If this isn't to your taste, the only option is converting to FAT32. And that will either cost you money (by purchasing a third-party program like Partition Magic that can accomplish the conversion -- hopefully without data loss), or you'll have to experience a certain amount of downtime, which would involve removing the partitions, repartitioning, formatting, and reinstalling the OS.
Toey
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