Compressed Drive?

[captain_slinky]

After having gotten the "You have no more space on your hard drive, click here to free up aditional space" for the bazillionth time, I decided to click around and see if I could find out just exactly WHERE all my hard drive space had gone.

And there, on the Drive Properties Screen (where it showed I was using 98% of my pathetic little 70GB drive) was an un-checked option for "Compress Drive To Save Disk Space". Hello, what's this? So I checked the un-checked box, hit apply, and told me it was gonna take about 14 hours to do the job.

Here I am 14 hours later, with a whopping THIRTY-SEVEN GIGS OF HARD DRIVE SPACE freed up! WOOT!

So now i just have to wonder... what are the down-sides of having a compressed drive? Am I gonna regret this later?

Comments

[supernovame.livejournal.com]

You'll have to let me know... it sounds scary! Maybe they introduced a black hole onto the hard drive which compressed it down nicely and the only drawback is that not only can you not get your files out until someone develops technology to get something out of a black hole, but that slowly your entire computer and eventually your house will be nicely compressed as well! :)

[collisions.livejournal.com]

It uses NTFS file compression to compress individual files. You may notice your drive and folders turn blue (if not, you can turn on the option to display compressed files in blue in View options).

It's not recommended for production Windows servers, but I've used it on my home machines for eons and have never had a problem with it. In theory, the incremental time it takes to decompress the files on access is partially made up by having to read fewer bytes from disk, so there shouldn't be a huge performance hit. I burn CDs/DVDs with no issue, for example. I haven't done any hard analysis of read/write times of compressed vs. uncompressed files, but it wouldn't be too hard if you're curious.

[hallerlake.livejournal.com]

File corruption tends to be unrecoverable; not that it's overwhelmingly good anyway. Don't do it for data you can't afford to lose. (And hell, what data is THAT?)

If I were you I'd go for a larger drive when they go on special. Circuit City had a 200 gig Seagate for $70 last week and a 300 gig Seagate for $100 after rebate. CompUSA had an 80 gig for $10 after a super hassle load of rebates.

By the way, going from 69 gigs full to 33 gigs full (?!) is pretty darn good :) A lot of stuff (ie, digital media) doesn't compress well at all, because a very compression algorithm is already built into most audio/video/image codecs. (GIF, MP3, MPEG, AVI, etc).

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

Oh, so it's Magic Door! Why didn't you say so in the first place :)

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's a lick of info on my PC that would ruin my life if it suddenly went missing, so I think it's all cool!

I've been seeing those ads every week from CompUSA and been tempted, but then I find other things like food and shelter to spend the money on. CURSE YOU, BASIC HUMAN NEEDS!!!

[hallerlake.livejournal.com]

heh heh, pesky details like that :)

[collisions.livejournal.com]

Heeheehee!