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To compress or not

T

thatsright

Diamond Member
Hi All, I just got a new External HD (1.5TB USB & eSATA) and during formatting, it asks to enable ‘File/Folder Compression.’ Should I do this?

1. Will it slow down copy speeds of NEF RAW Files, TIFFS, JPEGS etc?

2. How much of a hit would it be? I am using Win 8 x64 with NTFS formatting. I will also put a few music files and O/S backups, but at least 80-90% of this is for photo archiving.

3. If I do enable this, is it easy to remove?

4. I will use TryCrypt to encrypt the drives contents, can I use this program with file/folder compression.
 
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1. Maybe. On the other hand, if you're copying thousands of SMALL files, you might even see a speed boost.

2. Depends. Seeing your usage scenario (already compressed photos), I wouldn't bother.

3. If this is NTFS compression, a simple right click > properties > advanced should let you remove it.

4. I think so because compressions runs before TrueCrypt (that is, compressed data is encrypted, not the other way around). Again, doesn't make much difference.
 
Probably not a good idea. Based on your post, I'm assuming you're working with multimedia, so your files will either already be compressed, or you'll expend substantial CPU resources to decompress and compress raw files that you're working on.

You can compress a truecrypt, but you have to enable the compression within the encrypted volume. Enabling compression on the physical drive will not be effective.
 
encryption and compression also raise the risk of damage should something go wrong.

i'd compress multi-part rar and add PAR2 parity imo. i've seen too much unreliability on large external usb drives.

how's windows 8?
 
Emulex said:
encryption and compression also raise the risk of damage should something go wrong.

i'd compress multi-part rar and add PAR2 parity imo. i've seen too much unreliability on large external usb drives.

how's windows 8?
Click to expand...

Windows 8 is great. I had cancer up until this morning. after logging into Win8 for 10 minutes, I'm cancer free!!!
 
thatsright said:
it asks to enable ‘File/Folder Compression.’ Should I do this?
Click to expand...

Enabling file/folder compression does not mean the files/folders are compressed.

Enabling it merely means you will subsequently have the option and ability to selectively compress individual files and/or folders at your discretion through the usual litany of context menus and property menu pop-ups.

I know if no downside to enabling it. Using it of course can have downsides as well as upsides.
 
I don't know the specific of Windows file/folder compression, but I would say the vast majority of end-user content won't benefit much from compression. Most of our larger files - music and movies - are already compressed, and most of our smaller files are too small in total MB to make much difference. Do you really care if your 50MB of documents compresses down to 10MB? For ease of management I'll zip up a bunch of files with 7-zip, but I don't really care about the space savings
 
NTFS compression for media files won't do a whole lot except for the uncompressed files (raw). It can't further compress already compressed files.

My movies drive comprises of 1,358 GB of data. With NTFS compression it went down to 1,356GB.
 
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