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Topic: Compressing drive question |
Mark Krutke
From:
Tomahawk, WI USA
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Posted 20 Sep 2004 6:02 pm |
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Can anyone tell me the negative things about compressing a hard drive to save space? I've freed up alot of space and that makes me happy by doing this, but what's the drawback, if any?
Thanks, Mark
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www.authenticrecording.com |
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Will Holtz
From:
San Francisco, California, USA
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Posted 20 Sep 2004 10:43 pm
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If you've compressed your whole drive, you've certainly taken a performance hit. Depending on what you use your computer for, that might not be too big of a deal. But I wouldn't do it on a computer I use to mix multi-track audio for example.
I'm not up to date on the details of how the latest compression programs work, but with some methods you are more likely to loose all your files in the case of a bad sector on the drive. Without compression you'd only loose the file stored on the bad sector, but with some drive compression implementation one bad sector could result in all files on that drive being lost.
Bottom line is that storage continues to get amazingly cheap, so I'd buy another drive rather than compressing one.
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Will Holtz
From:
San Francisco, California, USA
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Posted 20 Sep 2004 10:51 pm
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One other thing...
If your drives use the FAT or FAT32 file system types, then much of the free space you gained was likely just due to over coming limitation in these file system types. They are relatively inefficent file system types for modern multi-GB size drives. If you are running windows NT/2000/XP, then you might be able to realize a good fraction of that space gain without using compression by changing your file system type to NTFS. The NTFS file system is more modern and deal with larger drives better. |
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