Smart NTFS Compress is a software designed to help to save room on your hard drive. The program's founder, Jérôme DERN, claims this software uses the 'windows NTFS compression system' that is supposed to allow you to compress files on your hard drive, saving you disk space. The program is easy to use as there is only one window which features everything you need. The first field is called 'Drive to compress', and requires you to type the virtual letter of the hard drive (in my case it was 'C:\'); in my tests, the list supposed to contain letters of hard drives doesn't work, you need to type the letter of your hard drive yourself. There are a few options in the main window allowing you to get statistics about the compressed files, and allowing you to speed up the compression. However, the compression ratio is much worse this way. The turbo mode should take less than 5 minutes to finish. In my tests, using the Turbo mode, I saved 25 MB from 25 GB of data. That's not much, so don't think you'll save a large space on your hard drive.
The trial version only allows you to use the Turbo mode that saves less memory but which is faster than the normal mode.
Bottom-line: This program can help you to save somedisk space but don't think you'll save the half of your hard drive space: the software is not very efficient. Depending on how hard is it to change you hard drive to get a greater room, this software can be worth the price.
Comments (1)
Registred version gave the following result:
- 6,5% of used Hard drive data has been saved by my tool.
- That means that 2498Mb has been saved out of a total used space of 40,6Gb (before tool usage).
- This compression was done in 28m and 12s.
Test conditions:
- Registred version of the tool, turbo mode not selected, maximum file size limit set to 500Mb,
- Windows 7 x64 freshly installed along with programs
- Compression done on an SATA II SSD drive,
- PC is Centrino Duo 2,4GHz with no other program running.
Remarks:
- x64 or x32 version of Windows is not important and gave the exactly same results,
- use of an SSD drive speed up the process of course.
But notice that, concerning the compression time, first usage is much more longer than next ones. Knowing that you should (recommanded) run the program every 6 month only, time is not an issue because further usages will be very quick.
jerome DERN
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