Hard Drive: Compressed or not to be compressed?

[Delboy :)]

Hiya guys n girls,

I was wondering if compressing ur hard drive is a good idea or not, what are the advantages and dis-advantages?

If any

 

[xotix]

leave it as non-compressed.

 

[TheMajor]

compressed is slower and more space
non-compressed is faster and less space

 

[Delboy :)]

Cool, thanks dudes.

 

[killians45]

best bet is if in ntfs to compress folders not used often. Like say, folders that contain images, or just crap not often used. dont compress the entire hard drive.

 

[silence782]

Compressing the harddrive raises the possibility of data errors. So, it's berst to leave it uncompressed if possible.

 

[killians45]

not talking entire drive, though. Just useless crap that he wants to just keep around like images and such. Put them into a folder and then compress that folder. Things like BMP's and stuff. Compress that one folder only. Thats the nice thing on NTFS, you can compress single folders and not have to do the entire HDD, and images are hard to corrupt. Hell, you could also do sound files, too. Just dont compress and dat files. So, make sure the folder doesn't contain anything like that. Say, you were running SQL and you wanted to compress some old SQL data bases. Go right on and do it I say, its fairly safe. Again, just stay away from system files.

 

[TheMajor]

how well does NTFS compress compared to ZIP,ACE,RAR etc??

 

[killians45]

pretty well because its a native compression. use it here at work on SQL server and some of our other backup servers and never had a problem

 

[vance43211]

years ago compression was a good thing. the best hard drive in 1995 was 2 gigs and it cost around $300-400.00

these days you can get a 160 gig for $99.00

you have no reason to compress anything now except for stuff you upload to the internet