My understanding is that consolidation of free space amounts to defragmenting the free space, IOW making it contiguous. There is definitely a point of diminishing returns there, and what seems to be lacking in the Microsoft program is an intelligent determination of where those diminishing returns begin, which I judged from watching the drive thrash for an hour to go from 5% to 9% after file defragmentation had been completed.
But yes, it looks like it's impossible to skip the free space consolidation. While the scheduled task uses the generic /O option, being more specific doesn't help:
Code:
C>defrag x: /d /u
Microsoft Drive Optimizer
Copyright (c) 2013 Microsoft Corp.
Invoking defragmentation
Analysis: 100% complete.
Pre-Optimization Report:
Volume Information:
Volume size = 1.81 TB
Free space = 298.90 GB
Total fragmented space = 0%
Largest free space size = 195.41 GB
Note: File fragments larger than 64MB are not included in the fragmentation statistics.
Performing pass 1:
Defragmentation: 100% complete.
Free Space Consolidation: 5% complete...
While the file defragmentation completed instantly, it's now stuck in the free space step, and a smarter program would have called it a day given that 195 GB of the 298 GB free space is contiguous. What really sucks is that this is a freshly formatted drive restored from a backup using SyncBackSE and file-based copying. To add even more insult to injury, I Ctrl+C'd it after about 15 minutes this time and ran:
Code:
C>defrag x: /a
Microsoft Drive Optimizer
Copyright (c) 2013 Microsoft Corp.
Invoking analysis...
The operation completed successfully.
Post Defragmentation Report:
Volume Information:
Volume size = 1.81 TB
Free space = 298.90 GB
Total fragmented space = 0%
Largest free space size = 171.39 GB
Note: File fragments larger than 64MB are not included in the fragmentat
ion statistics.
You do not need to defragment this volume.
Note that the "Largest free space size"
actually decreased, and the program stated that the volume doesn't need to be defragmented after it was perfectly happy to thrash my hard drive for what would have no doubt amounted to many hours had I not intervened. :facepalm: The only good thing I can say is that it seems to have gracefully handled the Ctrl+C interrupt, as it printed the following (but I'm still going to verify it against my backup):
Code:
Cancelling operation...
The user cancelled the operation. (0x89000006)
So, this task is getting disabled. It would seem that it's actively harmful to drive health.