Unused Index Entries: What causes them?
- by Bart Silverstrim
I was running chkdsk on one of our servers and it fixed 800 unused index entries (minor inconsistencies) on the drive. I also see these on lab machines running Deep Freeze, where most drive changes are supposed to be prevented although I'm not sure of the mechanism through which it does this.
The thing that got me more curious than usual is that this server does very little. Very little activity, it remotely serves out a web app with little use so it's rarely ever touched at the console...so what is it on NTFS drives that causes this? It seems to be treated as if it's nothing, but should this be happening on a barely used filesystem? Is it a sign of corruption? I would think it's something if a disk repair utility sees fit to report it and repair it.
Maybe this is more curiosity while doing some routine maintenance on servers, but I'd like to know what this is doing and why it happens, if anyone can give insight on this phenomena.