Compress drive to save disk space?

[Bizkitkid2001]

What does this option do, and should I have it checked?

[Detritus]

No, you don't want to compress your hard drive, it slows everything down quite a bit and with hard drive space being so cheap it really isn't worth it.

[Bill in SD, CA]

I did one of mine a while back and lived to regret it.

Bill

[elmers]

Yeah and the files you really want to compress like wavs and bmp the type specific (mp3 and jpg) works much better. It will slow down application loading times and search times. You might want to compress a single drive to gain about 10-20% if your really tight on space but with 1gb < $1 its just not worth the hassle.

[elroy]

IMO it increases the risk of lost data due to corruption of the compressed files.

[cysus]

One thing that would be cool is a hardware compression system, a physical compressor/ expansion device that fits between IDE cable and the hard drive.

[Dax_Brandy]

and it will slow the pc access to the drive too.. tried that once in my laptop. the pc slowed down severely.

[Gilthanaz]

Originally posted by cysus
One thing that would be cool is a hardware compression system, a physical compressor/ expansion device that fits between IDE cable and the hard drive.

I immediately pictured some kind of trash compactor-like device inside my computer.

[Bizkitkid2001]

What If I want to do it to a storage drive? I have a 200gig drive that only stores anime on it. How often do these "data corruptions" happen?

[zepper]

In DriveSpace, no one can hear you scream...
. This is another one of those cases where I would consider ECC memory mandatory as a memory glitch can lose a whole logical drive worth of data
.bh.