Harddrive COMPRESSION: Anybody use it on your monster drives?

[MadRat]

Just curious. I personally haven't seen it used since the 200mb HD days.

 

[MWink]

If I remember right, the one that comes with Windows does not work on FAT32 systems. But, why would you want to anyway???

 

[Jiggz]

HDD Compression slows down the HDD access and transfer rate. It's already slow as it is and is probably the main bottleneck on today's Ghz systems. So HDD compression is unnecessary considering FAT32 is already using a more efficient file system and the fact that HDD price is at its lowest ever!

 

[LocutusX]

Why would you want to? Considering the main use for most people's "monster hard drives" are for storing media files which CAN'T be further compressed using loss-less compression.

 

[McCarthy]

Yeah, that's the problem with compression. In the DOS 5 days, me and my 386 spent many a night cruching away to compress that 40 meg drive into a 60. Or maybe a 70. 2:1? Never. Oh sure, you could set the estimate so it'd say 80 to start with, but you'd never get that much on there.

And this was in the pre-mp3 days obviously. I didn't have many jpgs, etc compressed files either, just windows, a couple games, my Lotus suite. 1:3 was the ratio I actually ended up at usually in those days. Even if compression's more efficient, the files are already compressed like X said so it's a lot of work for very minimal space gain.

Plus, at least this is how it used to be, the compression would take the entire HD and cram it into 1 huge file, the volume archive. So if even one block on the HD went bad the whole thing was easily lost. Not good.

Good idea to leave it as a fond memory of the 200mb HD days

--Mc