Compressed Drive

[Guest]

In Disk Properties, if Compress Drive is selected, is actual disk space
conserved, or only apparent space? Also, is there an overhead burden
associated with having a drive compressed in terms of slower reads/writes?

Thanks,

 

[Detlev Dreyer]

In Disk Properties, if Compress Drive is selected, is actual disk space
conserved, or only apparent space? Also, is there an overhead burden
associated with having a drive compressed in terms of slower reads/writes?

Applies to WinXP as well: "Best practices for NTFS compression in Windows"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/251186/en-us

 

[Vanguard]

in message

In Disk Properties, if Compress Drive is selected, is actual disk
space
conserved, or only apparent space? Also, is there an overhead burden
associated with having a drive compressed in terms of slower
reads/writes?

Compression ALWAYS incurs overhead. Why? Because CPU cycles are
expended to decompress the file for an application to actually use the
contents of that file and compression is required to save any changes
back into the compressed file/volume.

If the bulk of the files to be compressed are binary or image files,
compression won't do much to reduce their size and can actually increase
their size. Those types of files are already compressed (or very little
compressible).

Sounds like it is time to start looking at getting another drive or
replacing with a bigger one.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307987/en-us

As I recall, you cannot use volume (drive) compression on the partition
in which Windows is installed (i.e., you cannot compress the OS drive),
but you could compress your own folders or files there.

 

[Gerry]

The obvious files to compress on the operating system partition / drive
are the uninstall Windows Update files. No overhead as in normal
circumstances never accessed and significant disk space gain. However,
this conversation seems to gloss over the differences between disk
compression and file compression.

--



Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[Vanguard]

The obvious files to compress on the operating system partition /
drive are the uninstall Windows Update files. No overhead as in normal
circumstances never accessed and significant disk space gain. However,
this conversation seems to gloss over the differences between disk
compression and file compression.

If you are not going to uninstall the Windows updates, you can delete
those $NtUinstallKB* folders.

I checked and there 110 such folders for Windows updates on my host that
consume 534MB. When saved into a .zip file using max compression, the
..zip file was 226MB in size. Yes, that returned 308MB on the hard
drive; however, you could just move the $NtUninstallKB* files to a CD-R
without even having to compress them. It is likely that 308MB isn't
much of a saving depending on the size of your hard drive.

 

[Gerry]

It's a contribution amongst others when you have limited free space and
you don't wish to delete. I have to admit I have never felt the need
ever to uninstall an update.


--
Regards.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~