Has anyone tried using NTFS compression on their SSD?

[ShawnD1]

I got a 30gb SSD and I need to use NTFS compression just to fit Vista and a few basic programs on it. So far it seems to work well. Even with the compression, it's much faster than any hard drive I've used before. Does compressing the drive even have a measurable effect on the speed? Has anyone tested if there's a difference?

I got it with a new 6-core system so the CPU demand caused by compression is never a problem

 

[=Wendy=]

You may even see an speed increase by using compression, providing of course the data can be compressed, as your actually writing less data to the drive. SandForce based SSDs use hardware compression on the SSD controller to great effect.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Apologies for the necro, but just wanted to chime in and say that NTFS compressions works extremely well!

My usage scenario : 120GB Vertex 2 --> 80GB OS, ~32GB Games partition (mapped to empty folder on 1TB Spinpoint F1)

Tribes Ascend + Diablo III + TF2 installed = 27GB, 21GB compressed. No noticeable impact on game load times on a 3.8GHz Phenom II X4.

 

[KingFatty]

Did you happen to have a before/after experience, using the same games/applications?

If anyone else tries this, could you use a timer to get some concrete benchmarks? Is this catching on?

Any reviews out there for this subject, I'm interesting in seeing a review on Anandtech where it's specifically using built-in NTFS compression on SSD as specified in the title for this thread, very interesting. It would feel good to use the extra cores that are sitting idle currently.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Some folks over at the HardForums are claiming that it improves SSD performance (due to decreased read/write data volume).
For me, the primary aim was to be able to comfortably squeeze in 3-4 games that I usually play at LANs without shelling out for a new SSD. At home, I just set aside a ~160GB SSD partition mapped to a mechanical drive just for games

Afraid I don't have any formal benchmarks, but it retains most of the SSD "feel"

 

[greenhawk]

For a non-sandforce it should help if there are spare cpu cycles on hand.

For sandforce ones, they do on the fly compression already so if anything it would be slower for those drives I suspect (looking to compressor already compressed data, so wasting time).

Comes down to which has the better compression, NTFS or the inbuilt compression (in the sandforce case, for the rest that do not do compression, NTFS should help).

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

You do gain the advantage of having more capacity at the filesystem level. For SF-based drives it might not be a good proposition for performance and/or lifespan though.

Regardless, seeing that the 80GB OS partition is normal and usually has ~30GB free, I don't think that I need to be overly concerned. Besides, it's sitting in my personal office unit - I don't think that it would sit well with the boss if I fired up D3, TF2 or TA with any degree of regularity

 

[BFG10K]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-ntfs-compression,3073.html

 

[taltamir]

from tom's hardware

NTFS compression isn't very aggressive and it excludes important Windows system files

This is false. they tried to compress C drive while the OS was running. NTFS cannot compress/decompress a file that has been locked against writes because it has been locked against writes.

You can compress those files by:
1. Create an empty compressed partition and then install windows on it (every single file will be compressed)
2. Plug your OS drive as a secondary on another windows machine and use it to compress the now not in use files.

I am more then a bit curious as to what the effects of NTFS compression are on a sandforce drive though.

 

[turn_pike]

This brought up the memories of the bad old days trying to save space by using Drivespace or Stacker.

 

[KingFatty]

This brought up the memories of the bad old days trying to save space by using Drivespace or Stacker.

Ah, but a more interesting issue is that perhaps with SSD, can you actually increase *performance*, in addition to freeing up space?

Are SSDs different enough from HDD, e.g., taking advantage of not degrading due to fragmentation (or other benefits) to where you could actually get a file faster using NTFS compression because you also happen to have a multi-core processor with idle cores just sitting around on-hand and ready to perform compression duties?

I think there is a link from tomshardware.com where they found certain usage scenarios show an improvement in performance.

I guess what I'm getting at is perhaps you could use NTFS compression as a way to proxy the built-in Sandforce compression, giving your ordinary non-sandforce controller SSD a turbo boost the way Sandforce enjoys a turbo boost due to its own internal compression.

 

[greenhawk]

Ah, but a more interesting issue is that perhaps with SSD, can you actually increase *performance*, in addition to freeing up space?

Hard to say as it could go either way (faster or slower). Some of the down sides with some compression is that they use larger data blocks when compressed so instead of reading just one cluster, you need to read two to get the needed data to extra. RAM and CPU over head might mean while you get the data faster, the program you are getting the data for will run slower without the CPU/RAM. If you turn up the compression higher (ie: third party program) it can increase swap file usage leading to worse overall performance.

And if someone tries to run a compression over the swap file, then the computer can really start having fun with running slow, noticable over heads and possible windows instability.