I've compressed a couple folders where there's on the order of thousands of small files. It does a fair bit of difference actually on the cluster waste in particular. Very nice, particulary for my High Voltage SID collection.
Compressed folders in NTFS/XP isn't worthless!
- Thread starter Guden Oden
- Start date
Killer-Kris
Regular
I've always just formatted my drives with compression enabled, never saw any reason not to. And on the few occasions that I've enabled compression after the fact on friends and families computers I've always seen space savings.
I suppose I've never heard/seen the down sides to doing this, anyone with any?
I suppose I've never heard/seen the down sides to doing this, anyone with any?
Killer-Kris
Regular
Diplo said:
Well actually if the data is smaller, both transfer time as well as time for the data to rotate under the head decrease while seek time stays the same. Yeah it'll use more CPU time but if you're running only one app the CPU should be free while it's waiting for the data anyways, it'll only be a few more clock cycles to decompress the data before swapping the app back in.
Over all from what I've seen, performance impact should be pretty neglible (+ or -) and I have always gotten a decent space savings. Now I've never actually seen any real performance tests done so the performance estimates are all pure conjecture on our parts.
Killer-Kris said:
Unfortunately, this is not really the bottleneck in a harddrive; read-ahead and/or write buffering caching schemes take care of that. What holds back performance is the dog-slow seeks offered by a mechanical actuator...
Meanwhile you're getting a pretty sizeable CPU hit on accessing the data. Usually data don't pass the CPU at all, DMA sends it straight to main memory instead, but here every byte has to be processed...
Ok, for single-tasking users it's probably not much of a difference, but power-users and/or gamers shouldn't use it. Besides, huge harddrives are cheap today anyway so it's not really needed.
Killer-Kris
Regular
Guden Oden said:Unfortunately, this is not really the bottleneck in a harddrive; read-ahead and/or write buffering caching schemes take care of that. What holds back performance is the dog-slow seeks offered by a mechanical actuator...
Yup, like I had been saying the major factor doesn't change for either so performance should be very nearly identical.
Well there's no reason that the data still can't bypass the CPU, and instead be decompressed when the app finally uses it. Of course I have no idea if windows is actually doing this or not.
Ok, for single-tasking users it's probably not much of a difference, but power-users and/or gamers shouldn't use it. Besides, huge harddrives are cheap today anyway so it's not really needed.
Harddrives might be cheap but there is still no such thing as enough space. At least for me there doesn't seem to be.
mito said:
Well, people like me have a fair amount of text/document files which are not compressed and take a lot of hard disk space. It's still useful to compress thses files with NTFS compression. Compress them with ZIP or RAR is not as convenient.
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