Does anyone compress their HDD?

Gig-O-Ram · May 16th, 2006

I was asking at OCF, and I thought I'd ask here too...

Do you have your HDD on disk compression? My Maxtor never has been, but my Seagate was on compression at first because the setting was checked by default, so I let it go that way. But I recently took compression off of it because there seemed to be a consencus at OCF that it wasn't necessary and that the CPU uses extra cycles when the files are compressed. It didn't actually matter to me one way or the other. I personally didn't notice the CPU "hit", and my space savings was minimal at best anyway.

Tyreal · May 17th, 2006

No I don't. As far as I know, overall hard drive performance is lowered. I won't go into detail since it's all in that link below. I haven't had the need to compress my drive, and I don't think I will ever need to.

What kind of drive are you using that had compression on a default? I know that in the past when disk density and space was low and cost was expensive that they had compression.

I found this article, everyone who is using compression should read it.
http://www.storagereview.com/guide20...omprLevel.html

Gig-O-Ram · May 18th, 2006

^^^
The drive I was referring to is my new Seagate SATA drive. After I formatted it and got it all in good working order, I noticed that in the drive properties it was already set on compression. I left it like that for awhile until folks started talking about slower performance and stuff like that. I took the compression settings off though. I have seen some stuff where games don't work well on a compressed drive, but AREA 51 had no problems at all, compression and overclock notwithstanding.

Tyreal · May 19th, 2006

The performance loss will probably be minimal unless the compression is large. For games, all you'll see is maybe one second longer when your waiting for the game to load.

Gig-O-Ram · May 19th, 2006

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tyreal

The performance loss will probably be minimal unless the compression is large. For games, all you'll see is maybe one second longer when your waiting for the game to load.

Actually, since I put A51 on the SATA (I used to have it on my Maxtor in the other system), I have noticed it seems to load somewhat faster than it used to, and in the new system with the OC, it is very repsonsive.

Tyreal · May 20th, 2006

Yea. So, load times are affected by compressed drives.

You play Area 51? I used to have it, removed it, but the Singple player was pretty fun, never beat the game though. I reached the part where those big circle things show stuff at me and you have to disable there shields and throw nades at them to kill them.

**Capper** · May 20th, 2006

Compression has a pretty significant effect on performance. Usually, if people are going to compress something, they simply compress a storage drive, or files they rarely use (pictures, installation programs, etc)

RangerXLT8 · May 20th, 2006

Compression should be left for storage and backups. For performance, it's kills performance.
I personally compress backup images(norton ghost) of all drives\arrays.

polobunny · May 29th, 2006

Nope, I don't compress. The gain is minimal, the performance hit too high. I have this bad habit of going totally crazy whenever something takes a bit longer than usual.
Besides my ghost images are burned on DVD's, and hard drives being so cheap if you need more space for a few things you can grab 160gb's for almost nothing or spend 5 more bucks and get a 250gb ;)