Compression on external USB HD (highly technical question!)

[coolVariable]

I have an external USB 1.1 harddrive.
Would the transfer speed on this external harddrive go up if i turn on NTFS compression on the harddrive?

I thought it might work like this:

1. fast internal CPU compresses file
2. compressed file is send via USB to harddrive
(because of the compression the file is smaller and thus transferred faster)

3. compressed file is read from external HD and compressed file is send via USB
(because of the compression the file is smaller and thus transferred faster)
4. fast internal CPU decompresses file


Any ideas if this works?

 

[DaveSimmons]

In theory. I vaguely recall this being true (for the same reasons) in the very early days of IDE (maybe the 486 era before the faster PIO modes were common and before DMA).

Just don't turn on encryption, or you'll be one of the panicked posters saying they've lost all their data after reinstalling XP

 

[Gunbuster]

Most anything you put on it that takes up room is compressed anyway, video, mp3, iso, pics, ......

 

[zephyrprime]

This will work. There are situations where this works even on internal drives. I know because I use this technique on my Usenet headers which are very compressible. Load times on them go up by integer factors with compression turned on. The only thing is, this may not be true for less compressable files and would yield no benifit for already compressed files like mp2, avi, jpg, etc. If speed is a big problem for you, you might consider a usb 2.0 enclosure instead.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: Gunbuster
Most anything you put on it that takes up room is compressed anyway, video, mp3, iso, pics, ......

Good point, at the time it was EXE files and uncompressed / lightly-compressed data that sped up. You won't get much or any compression of the already-compressed formats for audio, video, or images. [ ed ] or games -- data for most modern games is already compressed.

 

[coolVariable]

Well, I will be using it for backup and stuff mainly (backup my 400MB Outlook file for example) and just thought of this ...

I might not even use it but it is good to know.