Compress my files.

Hi all,

Just read an article about compressing files on a drive to save space.

I've started the process by right clicking on the drive>properties>compress this drive to save space.

The process has started but for time remaining it says "about 47,166 days and 14 hours remaining"!

This is just a tad longer than I'd like to wait. lol

It's on my primary drive which is a 32GB SLC SSD. I have disk indexing off and I'm using Vista 64.

Any ideas? Thanks.

 

Just wait for couple hours and the remaining time will decrease significantly. I compressed my partition full of things under a day.

 

idea: don't do it?

i know the space is small, but it works. i had vista + full office + visual studio + ableton live + traktor + 5gb sound and stilll 5gb space left. i had no secondary hdd..

i had bad experiences with compressing the system files on windows xp. and the amount of days it has to do it shows, it is not that nice to your ssd by a big chance...

that post was solely based on my opinion

 

Actually jackluo923, it only ended up taking less than a half hour to finish. I restarted and everything appears to be functioning normally. So far. I was able to gain 3GB on a drive that had 25GB of data.

@daveperman, it had just finished compressing when I read your post.

Thanks for the reply's.

 

I didn't catch the fact that you're using an SSD. When I compressed my fully used 500GB hdd, it took me a day to do it.

 

How much data was on that drive and how much space did you gain?

 

I had around 430GB of data on their and I gained about 5GB of free space after compression.

 

Yeah, check out my photo gallery for some equally outrageous wait times predicted by Windows.

 

When I saw more than 47,000 days till completion, I was thinking with all the improvements in Windows 7 would likely reduce this time to about 30,000 days. lol

 

Is it even worth it to compress when one could get a larger drive or put the data in an external??

Is there any performance increase/decrease from it?

 

In the "old" days compression was a cool thing. But I would not even bother with it now since disk space is abundant and cheap. And definitively better performance with non-compressed files/folders.

cheers ...

 

Since nowadays, processors are fast enough to compress and decompress without any effort, compressing drives will give you better performance, but not by a lot.

I always compress my hdds. It's a winwin situation because it gives me better transfer speed from the hdd and saves space.

 

It depends on your situation.

For me it was worth it. My OS is on a small 32GB SSD. I, of course, moved my users folder to my secondary storage drive to save on space and I've got hibernation disabled as well. I still didn't have as much free space left over as I would have liked. By compressing the drive I gained 3GB.

I boot just as fast and have noticed nothing detrimental. Almost all current processors are fast enough to where you don't notice any delay when a compressed file is opened.

For me, it was a win situation compressing my drive.

 

winwin except that it always costs you more cpu, that means more power, that means more battery life. and for the space gain, actually useless.

but, as always, to each it's own.

one thing, though. so far, compressed files can't be encrypted as well, can they? dunno. it was that way on xp. back in the days where i compressed files

 

The power a computer needs to decompress the file is probably less than the power needed to keep the hdd running/accessing data a little bit longer. Thus compressing the hdd might mean more power that means more battery life.

And yes.. you can encrypt compressed files in Windows Vista and Windows 7.

 

i thought i've read that somewhere, but was unsure. good to know.

but no, the gain from accessing the hdd a tiny bit less is too less to compensate for the additional cpu work. at least, was my experience on xp. with a 7200rpm disk, so not one of the power saving ones (or like my intel ssd now).

and he has an ssd, so the gain won't be there. only the space gain. but, as said before. to each it's own. it's one of those tweaks that i've put into "placebo tweaks". espencially, as i used vista on a 32gb ssd for half a year, with all sorts of apps and all my data on it, and even hibernate on, and had no need for it. this is near to the worst case one can put vista in still haven't tweaked it at all, and it performed great.

but if it helps the OP, who am i to judge

 

If my OS SSD was a 64GB or larger drive I would not have compressed the drive. Since it's only an 32GB SSD I needed a little more breathing room. I've now got almost 8GB of free space on the drive. It's worked out perfectly so far and using my laptop I can't even tell anything changed.

I didn't compress my second drive because it's a 250GB HDD with 200GB of free space.