NTFS Discovery performance - Best Practices (4291009)

Please review the below suggestions on how to improve NTFS discovery times. Depending on requirements they may not all need to be applicable. 

• Ensure the product is on the latest hotfix. The product team continues to add improvements to assist with discovery times. 
• Determine exactly what data is required in the reports. If shares can be excluded, exclude them from the discovery. If only the first few levels of folder structure are required in the reports, set the level within the discovery scope.
• Discovering files can be very time consuming an often not required within reports. Uncheck the option to collect files if enabled.
• If file permissions are required, enable the option to only collect explicit permissions. This will also greatly reduce the size of reports. Also, if the report "Duplicate File Details" is not required, do not enable the option to collect duplicate files. This option greatly increases discovery time.
• Is the report  "File and Folder Permissions with Differences" required? If not ,do not check the option "Calculate Differences between folder, subfolders and file permissions". This option greatly increases discovery time and is only used within the one report.
• Currently in version 2.6 one computer is considered to be one task. For this reason, if you are collecting 10 file servers it is best to have 10 nodes (the nodes should be manually configured to accept 1 task). This will force each node to collect one file server.
• Create a separate discovery for each file server collected. This will allow the schedules to be staggered so that not all file servers are being collected and stored in the database at the same time
• To properly stagger the schedules, the discoveries may have to be run a few times to get a baseline of how long each discovery takes to run. 
• It is recommended that each node have at least 100GB of hard drive space and 32GB of RAM
• It is recommended to have Enterprise Reporter on its own SQL server or at least a SQL server that is not already used heavily by other products such as Change Auditor
• Enterprise Reporter 3.0 and later has be some major improvements to NTFS discovery time. The biggest enhancement is the ability to break up the tasks by share instead of computer. This will allow multiple nodes/threads to collect one large file server. 
• For NTFS report performance, use the option Export to CSV. This will be much faster than generating the report first and then saving the results.