Win11/10 hard disk is not enough but things can’t be deleted?This gadget brings more flexible NTFS compression

Many friends have encountered the dilemma that the hard disk is almost full, and the garbage is almost cleaned up, but the contents in it cannot be deleted. What to do in this situation? Actually, turning on NTFS compression is a good idea. In Windows, the hard disk uses the NTFS format, which can use compression technology to save space. If you right-click on a hard disk partition and view properties, you can see options for compression.

However, the NTFS compression that comes with Windows is not flexible enough, or it is not compressed, and once compressed, the entire partition needs to be compressed. The reading and writing of NTFS compressed data needs to consume hardware performance. Will compressing an entire partition have a great impact on performance? This is a problem that many friends are worried about. In this regard, we can use the “CompactGUI” tool to perform more flexible NTFS compression.

CompactGUI:https://github.com/IridiumIO/CompactGUI

CompactGUI is an open source gadget,Its function is to perform NTFS compression on a file directory alone. Its use is very simple, you can run it directly after downloading.CompactGUI needs to rely on .NET 6.0 to run. If your system is not installed, a prompt will appear and jump to the official Microsoft download page of .NET 6.0 to download the desktop version and install it.

After CompactGUI selects a directory, you can enter the compression link. CompactGUI provides 4 compression strengths as follows.

XPRESS4K: Fastest, but lowest compression

XPRESS8K: The right balance of speed and compression

XPRESS16K: slower, but more compression

LZX: slowest, but strongest – note that it has higher overhead, so only use it on programs/games if your CPU is fairly powerful or if the program/game is older.

Generally speaking, choose XPRESS8K.

CompactGUI is good at compressing program data, and the compression effect on media data is average. If you want to get better results, it is recommended to use CompactGUI to compress the application folder, the compression rate can even be close to 50%, which is quite satisfactory.

Overall, CompactGUI is a very useful little tool. If your hard disk space is tight, you might as well use it to compress some relatively large application folders, I believe it will bring you a surprise!