NTFS File Compression, Any performance gain?

[wonder mike]

Since your hard disk is one of the biggest bottlenecks of your computer will enabling compression speed things up at all? I understand that it will use more cpu cycles, but if you got like a 2 gig comp will it really matter?

 

[Rand]

Enabling compression on files will slow down disk access to those files. Compression is to save space, not enhance performance.

 

[Schmo]

Not necessarily true. Most processors these days can decompress a file faster than than it would take to read that larger uncompressed file off of the hard disk. If you get good compression on a file, it is actually faster to read the smaller file and decompress it than it is to read the larger file uncompressed.

So... with poor compression, you are guaranteed a performance loss. With good compression, you could see a performance gain.

 

[Nothinman]

Going by the books it should be slightly faster for reads, less head seeks means better performance. But if you write a lot, especially a lot of writing to already created files you'll lose performance.

I would say keeping your filesystem defragged (gotta love MS filesystems and how they fragment to hell) would give a more noticeable performance boost.