compressing

are there any cons for compressing drive:c to save space?

slows down your system. compressing/decompressing is done on the fly and requires quite a bit of CPU time. With harddiscs topping 300 GByte... just get a bigger disc.

In reality, it's not so simple. What's faster, grabbing many bytes off a disk, or grabbing half as many?

I/O is a major bottleneck. Compressing data could well be faster, although you'll get more CPU usage.

Of course, if all you do (like a lot of us) is store images, movies, music, and archives, disk compression is retarded.

>>3 has a good point.  Depending on why it is you feel the need to compress, compression may get you very, very little.  File types that are already highly compressed files (MP3s, e.g.) have little extra room before they hit the theoretical limit of compression, and a compression ratio of 0%-5% just isn't worth the extra cost.

Wouldn't performing disk recovery on a compressed partition be pretty hard?

>>3
Compressing data could well be faster, although you'll get more CPU usage.
Haha oh wow. You are kinda stupid.

In reality the only times you're going to be reading large amounts of data off the hard drive will be for audio and video applications, and audio and video don't (losslessly) compress very well. Office documents and such compress better, but are rarely large enough for the compression savings to overtake the cost in CPU time.

>>6
Care to explain how you came to that conclusion?

You do realize that disk accesses are several orders of magnitude slower than your CPU, right? The fewer bytes you read off the disk, the better.

>>8
The fewer bytes you read off the disk, the better.
Not really. You see compression incresases I/O load. When reading and writing compressed data to and from the HD things go similarly to this: 1) read compressed data, 2) decompress the data; 3) process data; 4) compress data to be written to HD; 5) write the compressed data.
Rembeber a HD isn't a webpage here bandwith is severly limited and compression makes the internets faster.
Also you seem to have a bad case of stupid and need quickly help.

You see compression incresases I/O load.

You're an idiot. It's the opposite.

>>9
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/context/146109/484444

you're the one who needs help, fucking troll

>>1
Pros of NTFS compression:
● Same or better performance (in any 4- years old computer, I guess)
● You save some space

Cons of NTFS compression:
● In some circumstances, it can lead to more disk fragmentation

Things you should know about NTFS compression:
● It's not buggy and it doesn't fuck it up
● Recovery of dirty filesystems or glitches has exactly the same success
● It's good enough to use in a serious, production environment for long periods of time

>>12
Don't forget under cons:
- Bad idea if you do a lot of writing and you're running other CPU-bound processes
- Not useful if data cannot be compressed further.

hm i divided my hard drive in 2, disk:C (for all programs and such) and disk:E (for class work and downloaded junk). only compressed disk:c tho. so far its works well, just noticed some lag time when using stuff from disk:e, not sure if it has to do anything with the compresion but started noticing it after i did it

>>13
Very rarely it will affect other processes as I/O is always slower, even if it's using DMA (it cannot send an endless buffer to the DMA controller anyways).

It's indeed useless for compressed files (e.g. JPEG2000, JPEG and PNG pictures among others, almost all video files, all compressed archive formats...), but it won't hurt much as it'll leave it uncompressed if it notices it can't save at least one cluster.