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64MB on a floppy!? (Not a super disk)

P

Philippine Mango

Diamond Member
I haven't used drivespace 3 since windows 98SE which has been a while and so I fired up my laptop because I noticed when reading a floppy that it had a hidden 1.38MB file which I knew that meant I had a compressed disk. So I put in the floppy, mounted it and said I had about 2.38MB of space, which was nice, removed the files off of it and fiddled with it. I was bored and I changed the compression ratio and the drive ended up reporting 64MB OF SPACE!!!!! I know this is via compression but I have to say it's pretty impressive.

Now why is it that you can't get this kind of compression ratio in windows XP!? I've noticed drivespace 3 isn't available in windows 2000/XP at all and the only way to compress is via NTFS but you need at least a 512MB drive for NTFS so :/ Any ideas on compressing in windows XP?

BTW, do you really think I could have stuck a 64MB binary file on there or not?
 
Just use WinRAR or something.

No, I highly doubt you could get even a 64MB text file to compress into 1.44MB.
 
Originally posted by: scottws
Just use WinRAR or something.

No, I highly doubt you could get even a 64MB text file to compress into 1.44MB.
Click to expand...

Winrar doesn't have nearly as good of compression as does windows...
 
Originally posted by: Philippine Mango
Originally posted by: scottws
Just use WinRAR or something.

No, I highly doubt you could get even a 64MB text file to compress into 1.44MB.
Click to expand...

Winrar doesn't have nearly as good of compression as does windows...
Click to expand...
Where'd you pull that from? I was wondering why it smelled a bit strange in here...

The technological explanation is that Windows is giving you a best case estimate with nothing on the disk. If you actually put some real world data on there, you wouldn't get a compression ratio anywhere near as high as what it's predicting right now. BTW, WinRAR is optimized for compression, not for speed; the Windows algorith has to be fast(er), so it's not going to do as well. I guarantee that WinRAR will be able to do better than Windows' default compression any time, and I eagerly await your attempts to provide scientific proof otherwise.
 
Originally posted by: ProviaFan
Originally posted by: Philippine Mango
Originally posted by: scottws
Just use WinRAR or something.

No, I highly doubt you could get even a 64MB text file to compress into 1.44MB.
Click to expand...

Winrar doesn't have nearly as good of compression as does windows...
Click to expand...
Where'd you pull that from? I was wondering why it smelled a bit strange in here...

The technological explanation is that Windows is giving you a best case estimate with nothing on the disk. If you actually put some real world data on there, you wouldn't get a compression ratio anywhere near as high as what it's predicting right now. BTW, WinRAR is optimized for compression, not for speed; the Windows algorith has to be fast(er), so it's not going to do as well. I guarantee that WinRAR will be able to do better than Windows' default compression any time, and I eagerly await your attempts to provide scientific proof otherwise.
Click to expand...

I dunno, I'm not saying "FOR SURE" that WinRAR doesn't provide better compression than windows but in my comparison to my faded memory of drivespace 3 and Winrar, I'd say that drivespace3 is better. So, I'll see if this works...

Nope, you're right, tried sticking a 52MB on a "76MB drive", didn't work... I just don't know why they even bother...
Now, on to figure out whether or not Drivespace 3 has better compression than WinRAR...
 
BTW, do you really think I could have stuck a 64MB binary file on there or not?
Click to expand...

No, it's just a very optimistic estimation. As soon as you start putting data on it the estimation would be updated and would be a lot smaller.
 
Nope, windows' compression is worse than WinRAR I think because when I transferred a 1.38MB file off the drive(rar file) compressed the disk and then tried putting the file back on to the drive, it wouldn't even fit! I'm going to try one more time another way but otherwise it's hopeless.. I guess drive compression is best for disks...
 
If you store a text file with a lot of repeating text(say a log file from some really boring program that does the same thing over and over) you can probably get even more than that.
In the vast majority of cases you won't however.
 
Originally posted by: scottws
Just use WinRAR or something.

No, I highly doubt you could get even a 64MB text file to compress into 1.44MB.
Click to expand...

I have seen 20-22 MB compressed on to a floppy, but 64MB could be stretching things a little bit.
 
Originally posted by: Googer
Originally posted by: scottws
Just use WinRAR or something.

No, I highly doubt you could get even a 64MB text file to compress into 1.44MB.
Click to expand...

I have seen 20-22 MB compressed on to a floppy, but 64MB could be stretching things a little bit.
Click to expand...

It's gonna take some special circumstances but it could happen. Big longshot though.
 
Originally posted by: Smilin
Originally posted by: Googer
Originally posted by: scottws
Just use WinRAR or something.

No, I highly doubt you could get even a 64MB text file to compress into 1.44MB.
Click to expand...

I have seen 20-22 MB compressed on to a floppy, but 64MB could be stretching things a little bit.
Click to expand...

It's gonna take some special circumstances but it could happen. Big longshot though.
Click to expand...

It is true.
 
Originally posted by: Philippine Mango
Originally posted by: stardrek
Winrar doesn't have nearly as good of compression as does windows...
Click to expand...

Ahahahahahahahahahaha! Oh man...wooooo. Thanks I needed that.
Click to expand...

Learn to read the fscking thread douche.
Click to expand...

I read the rest of it, but that doesn't make the previous post not funny. Chill out.
 
Originally posted by: scottws
Originally posted by: Brazen
7zip has better compression than windows zip, ntfs compression, or rar.
Click to expand...
It's barely better than RAR (and much, much worse in some cases). It's also a fair bit slower than RAR, and has less features.

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=34&threadid=1792947&enterthread=y
Click to expand...

Between the three programs the differance in time is only several seconds, it is nothing to fret over. My advice is to choose the compression utility that you are most comfortable using and has the features that you love.
 
You could compress 64 MB onto a floppy, but it better be something like a text file with a lot of repeating characters. If you had something like a "spam.txt" file on that floppy that just said

SPAM
SPAM
SPAM
SPAM...

For 10 million lines, I'll bet that file would compress to about 1% of it's original size.
 
Originally posted by: ultimatebob
You could compress 64 MB onto a floppy, but it better be something like a text file with a lot of repeating characters. If you had something like a "spam.txt" file on that floppy that just said

SPAM
SPAM
SPAM
SPAM...

For 10 million lines, I'll bet that file would compress to about 1% of it's original size.
Click to expand...

I just did that, the .txt file is over 5.09MB in size but when it ran it through winzip the size shrunk down to 9.22 KB!
 
Yeah, it would make it. I just did "TEST " in notepad and repeated it. I came up with a 59.5 MB text file. Default compression in WinZIP takes it down to 88.8 KB.

So the final answer is yes, you could get 64 MB to compress into 1.44 MB, but about the most useful thing it could be is a log file output by some program that keeps doing the same task over and over like someone previously mentioned.
 


A 27.3MB "Spam" File compresses to:

49KB with Winzip as a Zip file
24.3KB with WinRAR as a RAR File
14.1KB with 7Zip! as a 7z file!


SPAM
SPAM
SPAM
 
in winrar, u can enable "solid archiving". painfully slow, but really effective. basically scours the entire file for duplicates. best used with multiple files tho...
 
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