compress drive to save disk space??? whats that?

[Chrissirhc]

What compression does it use? Does it compress all your files? Does it slow down the system much? Are there any stability issues?

Cheers

Chris

 

[jaeddy]

Not sure of the algorythm they are using. Stability is not an issue. Speed is relative- since files are compressed there is less disk activity involved in reading them, but they have to be uncompressed which chews clock cycles, but since most modern systems are massively overpowered where the CPU is concerned this may be a non-issue.

I beleive you can actually compress at the folder level. Say you have a folder with a large database file in it, you can right-click the folder (or even the file, for that matter), select prperties and check off compress. If you do it at the folder level anything you save to that folder will be compressed.

 

[Chrissirhc]

Good answer thanks. Fair argument about the speed issues.

I'm also concerned with stability. I remember ages ago using some compression probably back in the days of windows3.11 and it used to mess up quite badly talking about disk not mounting etc it was horrible (I wish I could remember the name of the program). I guess this is really stable?

Even if so there's got to be a downside?

Cheers Chris

 

[jaeddy]

I use folder level compression in our production NT 4.0 network for SQL databases, hence the database example, and have never run in to a problem wth it. Those old compression tools in the DOS days were horrid so the comparison is inapplicable, and in this case the compression is set as an attribute of the files/folders- no mounting a compressed volume. I do believe that if you were to compress the entire drive you would find a slew of files that did not compress because they are needed to start the system and load whatever engine is used to read the compressed files.