The main goal of defragmenting all those terabytes of files is so that new files are saved in very few fragments. So I'm starting to now lean heavily towards the belief that Smart Defrag is crap, but tries to look efficient.

the 15-20% minimum that you 'need' isn't enough. Cram as much of the data on every other hard drive, SSD, SD card or other transflash that you can. If decompression thru the GUI and Windows Explorer is interrupted, it will show the whole drive as decompressed in properties even when its not, and AFAIK it won't verify that its done the job if you check the box to compress it again, interrupt that, and then uncheck it again in the hopes that it will decompress everything You can see progress better (the progress bar in the Windows GUI isn't accurate anyways) and its easier to interrupt and resume later (it'll wiz thru all the files its already decompressed). Turn it off it you had it on, I recommend using the 'compact' command from the command prompt (go to the root of the drive, preferrably in powershell, and run 'compact /u /a /i /f /s' without the 's).

I recommend Defraggler:ĭon't use NTFS drive level compression. Smart Defrag seems to be is very convincing snake oil.

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