your thoughts on "compress drive to save disk space"

[ceez]

hello everyone.

I have a question, at work we're preparing an HP nas with 450gigs of space for file archiving. I formated the disks (raided) and selected "compress drive to save disk space". I copied a few files over and noticed the compression, it looks promising. Apparently nobody uses it out there on web and everyone that denounces it is talking about compression of the C:\ drive which is not my case, my C:\ drives are not being compressed.

Just wanted your thought and or experience on using this feature.

thanks!

ceez

[Tripredacus]

Compressing the C drive is a bad idea only in the fact that you will add a delay everytime you try to use the compressed files as Windows will have to expand them before accessing them. Typically you only should compress files that are not used or accessed frequently. As an example, you could compress archived data, or the i386 folder, but not the User Profile, the config folder or Temporary Internet Files.

[ceez]

@Tripredacus, i am not compressing the c:\ drive, I am compressing another drive for archival purposes.

[cluberti]

Compression will result in slower opening of the file (assuming these will all be hits over the network) and a bit more load on the host CPUs and memory, but there's nothing inherently bad about doing this.

[DosFreak]

Don't do it unless you need to do it.

I use it on log files and backups of SQL databases all the time at work (log file directories can get into the gigabytes if you have alot of logging and you like to keep a history).

I've also used it on external USB drives that I use for personal use and have done so for the past 6 years with no issues.

HD space is so cheap you really shouldn't have to worry about using NTFS compression on a server nowadays.

If you are backing up alot of the same files you can look into SIS which can greatly reduce file storage requirements.

[mafadecay]

I agree with what has been said on lots of things here. i.e. Never compress c:\ drive and it does slow things with indexing but you can turn this off but leading to longer search times. Catch 22!

NTFS format also causes problems when trying to repair a compressed drive. Basically any NT based OS can't repair compressed drives. Actually they can in theory but very hit and miss and I have only ever had one sucess.

I do have some external USB 500GB's compressed but would hate them to fail. I got another backup though! I suppose archives are not too bad thats what I use it for too.

[ceez]

great that's some excellent input. Thank you for sharing. I guess there's no real danger to compressing unless the drives go bad. Either way these are going to be backed up to tape. These are just old architectural projects that we're just leaving them on a server for the users who are always requesting restores from projects 10 years ago can easily get to them without waiting on a restore or wasting my time for a single file! >[

thanks again guys!

ceez

[jaclaz]

I may add that the only way to find out is to actually test a setup.

I mean if the machines connected to the network are prolly fast (high speed processor and adequate RAM) and the network is slowish, tramsferring LESS data (and later expanding it) might be actually faster.

The other way round, a Gigabyte network and low end machines may prove the contrary.

jaclaz