Compressing Hard drive?

Is it safe to compress the entire hard drive?

 

Is this the active hard drive that you are currently using that you are asking about? If it is the current active drive you are using in you computer (i.e. running windows or some other OS from) then this would NOT be a good idea, think of it, whenever you had to do anything your computer would be bogged down uncompressing file after file, the OS would move incredibly slowly if not freeze up. If however this is a second drive or perhaps an external one then I don't see why you could not compress the data on the drive to save space...

Just remember that compression takes alot of time and CPU cycles to complete so if you have a large drive it might take a while to compress the entire volume also accessing a large file will mean uncompressing it... if you are after space try other means first and compression as a last resort IMHO.

 

do you mean compressing the drive (right click active hdd, properties, compress file to save disk space) ?

i did that with my old P3 rig...with windows 2000 pro on it. it became 16GB to 14GB. you will notice some lag in some programs or accessing files

 

Thanks, I'll just leave it be.