Reduce pre-allocated disk space We have a reporting SQL (2014 R2 Enterprise) system with a Reporting and Staging DB on it. The reporting DB is pre-provisioned at 4 TB across 8 data files. Currently it contains just shy of 1 TB of data and growth is marginally slow.

We need to reclaim 2 TB of that pre-allocated space on the SAN...

Since the data files are pre-grown, I assume I need to just change the file initial size and then perform a shrinkdb operation. I know the concerns and issues involved in a shrinkdb, and I just reviewed the article written by @BrentOzar (https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2017/12/whats-bad-shrinking-databases-dbcc-shrinkdatabase/) about it.

Given the pre-allocated file size versus the actual usage, should I be less worried about the fragmentation consequences?

On a side note: I love the tag descriptor when entering 'Shrink' as a tag...
In the end, as some have suggested, our only option was to incrementally shrink files w/out truncate only. The cost/benefit didn't really work out, so we are living with what we have.

Thank you all for the help and suggestions.