Compressed Hard Drives

[Aztech]

I noticed my secondary drive (data drive) in my machine is compressed. I realized it when I noticed that the files and folders were showing up in blue in Windows Explorer. Anyway, I was wondering what you guys think about using compression on the drives. Does it slow you down? Should I/Can I uncompress it? etc...

 

[LED]

Yes compressing HD's does cause 1 performance hit and with the low costs of HD's today I see no reason to do so unless absolutely necessary (Can't think of any reason). Many older files and software stuffs get compressed in the OS too which is better then compressing the HD IMO. When a HD is compressed sometimes data gets messed up esp when trying to copy it or in the case of uncompressing the Drive which Can be done by kooking in the HD' Properties under the General Tab

 

[thomsbrain]

if you've got a fast processor it seems like the hit wouldnt' be so bad though (speaking out of conjecture, not experience). it seems like usually the bottleneck is the hard drive, so compression would actually speed up the physical reading and writing since you'd get "more" data out of the drive per second, assuming your processor was fast enough to keep up with the compression/decompression. but maybe no processor is fast enough, i don't know.

 

[bdmst16]

I take it that you're running Win 2K or XP. It really depends on what type of files are compressed. If they are used regurally then I would consider uncompressing those files. If they are used only once and a while, then leave them compressed.