Anyone use drive compression with Vista?

Does anyone use drive compression on any partiton with Vista? How does it perform, and are there any significant drawbacks? I'm assuming if you had a drive failure it would be near impossible to read the contents on the drive from a recovery software standpoint?

 

Drive space is cheap, drive compression significantly slows down read/write speeds. Since this is already the bottleneck on most computers, I don't see any point in using it unless you're super duper hurting for space and can't stomach the $90 on a 500GB drive.

 

Agreed Hep!

I've got a small 32 Gig SSD for my OS and a few programs I like to have run at start-up. Everything else has been moved to a second HDD.

 

Well, considering at the moment I am unemployed, and have returned to school, and my two babies need food/formula, diapers, and clothes, it's hard to justify spending another $100 until I get back to work (I know wah wah wah).

Laptop was provided as part of the training program. I will be using my Lenovo mainly for school stuff, it has a 250GB 5400RPM, but my data / backup partition is already getting quite full.

I'll live with it for the moment, compress if I have to, and spend the $100 if push comes to shove.

 

It looks like you have quite a few laptops, why not just sell one?

But joking aside, you said "my data / backup partition is already getting quite full"
If your OS/Programs partition is still relatively empty, why not shrink it and expand the space to the data partition?

Also some other things I think work better for being conservative on space:
-disable system restore, or set it to only keep one restore point (system restore is a band-aid, not a real fix for any problem. Yeah, it works for people who can't fix things another way, so I can't say turning it off entirely is right for all people. But I don't think anyone needs more than one restore point)
-shrink the recycle bin to be as small as it gets
-disable hibernation if you don't need it
-if RAM permits, shrink the pagefile
-run CCleaner regularly

 

Actually, it can often speed up read/write speeds... just because compression reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred to/from the disk.

The disadvantage though is CPU usage.

I don't know... this is compression, not encryption... I wouldn't really make that assumption, but I'm not really sure either.

 

Interesting, I will keep that in mind. Thank you for the correction.

 

Thanks for the tips guys (Hep!, swarmer). Yeah, it's not that I CAN'T afford the $100, it's that I don't WANT to at the moment. Although will sell anything I have to if it gets to that (hope not!)

Anyhow, I have read about improved read/write speeds, mainly because you're reading or writing less data, but depending on the CPU, it may or may not be beneficial for performance reasons.

I think I may just bite the bullet and get the WD Scorpio Blue 500GB 5400RPM. Seems like a favorite, and would definitely be more than enough for my needs.

 

I use it on my flashdrives to *"increase" read/write throughtput.

 

Do you really need everything on your hard drive at all times?

Consider archiving seldom used information.

 

Uh, thanks? As a computer enthusiast for 20 years, I know how to manage archives. I have 1.5TB storage on my home server.

I bit and bought a WD Scorpio Blue 500GB. After I started making my Virtual PC drives that space was eaten up quickly. I'd rather not have to shuffle for space all the time.

Thanks though for all the input.