Hard drive compression

[AMDPwred]

My hard drive is just getting smaller and smaller by the day. Would compressing the drive make it less stable at all? Slower? I plan on buying a 40-60GB drive soon, but for the next few weeks I need to keep this 20GB drive as free as possible. I've got Norton Ghost 2002 waiting so I can clone the old 20GB drive on to the new one. Would compression the current drive cause any problems there?

 

[Paulson]

Compression causes all sorts of problems...

Not only does it make things slower, but everything will almost certainly get screwed up...

You can wait if you got a bigger hard drive coming soon...

 

[AMDPwred]

Yeah I'll just wait a few weeks for my new drive.

 

[TwilightZone77]

I seem to recall reading somewhere that compressing an NTFS-based drive doesn't really create problems, unlike fat32.

 

[AluminumStudios]

Hard drive comrpession is problematic and slows you down. Plus, MP3, JPG, AVI, MPG, and most other media will not loose any size as it is already compressed.

Lossless compression used on file systems is based off replacing frequent strings with smaller tokens. Multi-media already has that done.

I assume your HD is full of media files? If not then that's a heck of a lot of software you have installed!

 

[Lord Evermore]

I wasn't aware that compressing a drive necessarily "created problems". Certain applications might have a problem, but overall it's not an issue.

NTFS compression is built into the file system, so it's much simpler than FAT compression, as it doesn't require an external driver or "host drive". That does definitely make it less likely there would be an issues.

However since I expect what you're filling that drive up with is videos and MP3's and the like, you'd be wasting your time to compress it. MP3, Divx, MPEG, et cetera are all highly compressed formats. No compression scheme, whether it be the file system or a Zip type program, will get any additional compression. So a 3MB MP3 would appear to take 6MB on a compressed drive (this was an issue years ago with games, since compression was common, they'd specify that the game might take say 100MB on your drive, but 200MB on a compressed drive, since most of the files couldn't be compressed).

 

[AluminumStudios]

Isn't that pretty much what I just said 😛

 

[Mavrick007]

Don't you have to have enough free space to actually compress a drive anyway?
If AMDPwred has his drive getting smaller, it might not be able to compress anyway.

Also, doesn't that only work on the free space that you have left? For instance, if you have 5gigs free left and it compresses, it doesn't work over all the data presently on the drive?

 

[MWink]

I didn't think you could compress a FAT32 partition. I know it used to be that way because I tried and it wouldn't let me.