what do you guys think comparessing hard drive? is it good to comparess or not? whats the advantages and disadvantages? thanks alot leave it, or u gonna f--- it

If you compress your local disk, it will allow you to gain more space, but when you want to open your programs it will run a bit slow, because it needs to decompress the files 1st.

Compressing is not a good idea. If you need more space, add a second hard drive. Actually, I think everyone should have a second hard drive for backups.

In addition, if your file system is FAT32, compression is not an option. Compression used to be an important criteria in the early days of the PC. Nowaday why bother with it when the HD prices today are so cheap ($125USD for a 300GB HD)? i_XpUser

I disagree that a compressed drive will act slow. The average drive is VERY slow access compaired to internal system speeds. Ms's versus Us's access to the order of 1000 to 1 speed difference. In most computers you have excess cpu time. The disk that is compressed has it's data compressed on the disk and up the ide or scsi chain up to the processor, which decompresses it. Becase you transfer less data on the slowest of the devices the computer will normally act faster. This is the same sales pitch that is true for dial up companies that offer speed improvements. they transfer less actual data in a compressed form. Your computer decompresses it. Unless you transfering a iso or zipped or other compressed file that is. I can see no disadvantage unless you deal with very large files that are non-compressable.

Jefro, I'm afraid that you have been musinformed. The decompression time is much more than the time saved by transferring less data. The data is transferred using DMA which does not use CPU cycles, whereas decompression uses the CPU intensely.

Addendum to the above. Even if DMA wasn't used,decompression would still take more time than the data transfer would.