compress hard drive to save space

do you recommend i do that?

 

NO, I do not. Reasons? Just don't do it. I don't remember the details, but I did it in the past on my desktop and it was just a bad move.

Cheers,
Mike

 

Never ever do this on a laptop. The performance of the HD is slow enough at it is.. Compressing your drive will cut your disk IO performance by 15-20%. And also require a significant chunk of CPU power to open anything that is compressed (on-the-fly decompression) which will kill your battery. Also, it will give you up to 10% more disk space (8 gigs on an 80 gig hard drive). but if the drive is full of MP3s, DivX, etc. These can't really be compressed any smaller.. Further, if you compress a volume that was previously uncompressed and reasonably full, the compression will cause a very very nasty fragmentation of the disk. And if the disk is full-enough, (less than 10% or so free) Defrag will
will fail to be able to defrag all the files. Which will cause additional loss of performance.

You can choose to compress a folder, but you'd be lucky if you got .05% more disk space from compressing a MP3 folder which was taking up more than 10% of your total disk space.

Buy a new larger capacity hard drive, don't compress.. Unless you're just compressing something that you never use.. In which case, you'd still be better off just burning it to CDs then removing it.

 

If you're low on disk capacity, and assuming that you're running Windows, use the Disk Cleanup utility; you may be able to reclaim some disk space that way. It may only get you a few MB and it may only be temporary, as you will re-accumulate temporary internet files, setup files, etc.

FYI, Windows already employs a background compression scheme. This is also reached from the Disk Cleanup utility. You can tune it to compress files when they remain unaccessed after <n> days. Play around with that configuration. I wouldn't get too carried away, though. As Sidicas mentioned, certain multi-media files are already tightly compressed, so you won't get much bang for your buck there. Also, you will pay a performance penalty for opening Windows background-compressed files. I believe they show up in Explorer with blue hi-lighted names.

Hope this helps...

 

And to echo prior posts, I would not do this either. If you need more space, consider buying a new internal drive or an external one for storage.

 

I heard its not a good thing to do also, just buy more space and save yourself possible headaches or data loss.

 

Hi...long-time lurker, first time poster!

Unfortunately, being the novice I am, I have compressed files on my laptop (mostly .mp3 and .pdf files), which has saved me about 1GB of space.

However, reading this thread scares me and makes me think I made the wrong move here. Is there any way that I can "uncompress" these files, or am I doomed?

 

Right click on the compressed file or folder, click properties, click advanced. Uncheck “Compress contents to save disk space.”

 

NO, do NOT run the disk cleanup utility built into the OS. It's rubbish and will mess with your files.

Just go in and manually delete temp folders, caches, temporary internet files, etc.

After that configure the programs that use these folders to use less space on your harddrive for temp files and internet caches.

External drives are really cheap nowadays, but instead of that you can buy another harddrive that is better than your current one and swap them, then buy an external harddrive cover for your current harddrive and use it as an external harddrive.

There's a really nice one from Vantec that comes with a carrying case for your harddrive. It also comes in a variety of colours from Black, Blue and Red.

Cheers,
Mike

 

thanks for everything...

 

Rubbish? In what way? I've been using that utility since Windows2K, I've never seen it "mess" with my files. What exactly does "mess" imply? Fragmentation? Corruption?

Whenever possible, esspecially with people with limited know how, use the cleanup facilities provided by the OS or application (e.g. Internet Explorer). Don't just start rampaging through the file system, deleting files. Things like temporary internet files & caches are supposed to be opaque to users anyways. You might be in for a supprise if you clean out all of your cookies, and then have to re-enter things like username & password at every web site you visit.

Just my 2 sense...

 

Thanks a lot

 

You may save space by compressing PDF files (there is a lot of wasted space in text), but MP3 is already about as compressed as it gets.

 

My problem is that i clicked on it wanting to create more space and my laptop just turned off. Now when i try to turn it on it won't even go to the welcome screen, it'll just tell me to try with "safe mode" and other similar options. when i do (and i tried them all) it will jump back to the same error screen. What did i do? What DO i do?

 

Wow, a lot of scare tactics going on here.

Performance It's actually possible to increase disk performance using compression. If the disk is slow because of sustained reading/writing lots of data on the drive, compression makes that data smaller, which means less needs to flow over the drive bus, which gives you faster speeds. Real-world performance is debatable, but that's the theory. It might have an impact on your battery life, as mentioned.

Media Files mp3, avi, mpg, jpg, etc... files will not gain any disk space if you compress them. It will also cause a performance penalty because the system doesn't know this and tries to compress/decompress them.

Fragmentation The act of compressing might cause fragmentation, but not the kind that really hurts performance. Vista has a defragmenter that runs in the background that will clean up anything nasty by itself.

Disk Cleanup There's nothing wrong with using this utility. Just think before you check off everything and clean.

Otherwise, if you want to know where your space is going, check out the guide in my sig. As far as compression goes, there's nothing wrong with it, but use it as a last resort to gain space.

 

Unfortunately, you can either put the drive in another computer and uncompress those files from a working Windows installation, or you get to reinstall Windows. If you have critical data on there, take it to a PC repair shop and tell them what you did. Compressing drives can be very dangerous (as you have found out firsthand), and is rarely recommended. I don't even know why Microsoft allows that as an option.

Thanks for the informative post, orev. Everything you said was spot-on.

 

I have my HD compressed under XP for years(including \Windows and \Program Files), I don't see a problem. On average it use 60% of the actual size. I don't collect MP3 etc. though.

It actually should improve performance, especially for today's multicore hardware. The one least used component is the CPU(unless you are playing games all the time) which is the fastest, and the most used component is the HD which is the slowest. So make the fastest component work more and the slowest component work less makes sense.

 

THANKS! Can i use my dell desktop to decompress the laptops files? (the laptop is not a dell, i think its something cheap like soltec).
If i can, where can i find step-by-step instructions?
I do have very important files in there!
Thanks again.

 

most linux distro now support at least reading compressed NTFS partition. So you can find one of those live CD linux, boot up and retrieve the file you want.

Encryption is a totally different thing.

 

I haven't had any experience with compressed drives myself, since I'm often CPU limited in what I do But, if a Linux LiveCD will do that, you may be better off using that. Get an Ubuntu LiveCD or something, and a USB drive that you can use to transfer the files off of the laptop with (or spend some time learning how to network with Windows and Linux), and then nuke and pave once everything's backed up.