has anyone used disk compression in windows ?

[enyaw]

I was wondering how much disk space you save and how effictive disk compression is for windows xp?

any info would be helpful

 

[enyaw]

let's say I'm on a budget and I have a 500g hd and waiting for a sale for a 1t drive. And the drive was 80% filled would it be helpful to use compression? Does it take a long time and how much space would I reclaim?

thx for responding

 

[enyaw]

Do you have a link for that price you quoted? And how much would a 1t cost me? Is it local or online?

 

[jwmorrice]

Do you have a link for that price you quoted? And how much would a 1t cost me? Is it local or online?

Geez man, just look around a bit. For example, see here: http://www.pcvonline.com/

jwm

 

[Master_Bates]

www.canadacomputers.com I'm not saying they have the best prices, but it'll give you an idea of what's out there, and they most likely have a location near you.

 

[WoodPeckr]

1 TB with free shipping

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM $139.99

It gets good reviews.

 

[cypherpunk]

let's say I'm on a budget and I have a 500g hd and waiting for a sale for a 1t drive. And the drive was 80% filled would it be helpful to use compression? Does it take a long time and how much space would I reclaim?

How much space you'll save depends on how much uncompressed stuff you have. If it's mostly Xvids and ZIPs, you won't save much.

Of course, compressing a 500GB drive is probably a really, really bad idea. I'm not sure how the system works today, but back in the 90s it was a great way to double the work load of your hard drive and it probably caused a lot of drive failures.

 

[enyaw]

ok thanks, I'll abort the idea. I don't want to lose my stuff while fiddling around. Maybe back in the day it was the thing to do. Not worth risking my shit for that.
Harddrives were puny back then.

thanks

 

[PDSAjax]

Disk compression on XP works a hell of a lot better than it used to. The Win9x and older model involved putting all your files into one big compressed file and mounting that as a virtual disk...hence ending up with two drives. I have had several clients in the past who did this, then saw a big file taking all the space on their newly acquired second drive and being very clever thought they could delete it and recover that space......

In Win XP, compression follows the WINNT model, it is done at file level. Each file is compressed individually, and naturally the amount of compression varies. There is no set in stone rule as to how much space you will recover, it really does depend on the nature of the data that is being compressed. One thing that is guaranteed though is the increase in CPU overhead required to compress and decompress on the fly. No real increase in drive utilisation though.
With very large drives being so cheap these days, it is better to not risk compression where possible. But remember....drives do fail...and 1Tb is a lot of data....make sure you have a backup

 

[The Bandit]

Why not just put in a second hard drive.

 

[enyaw]

I'm going to pickup a network attached storage case and access my data from anywhere instead. I was intrigued by the idea of disk compression and how it worked. I have lots of data but it's not invaluable. Waiting on 1t to drop then get the nas

 

[sailorsix]

can you reverse the compression???