Compressing data on hard drives

[Khaydarin]

I'm going to be building a new PC in the next two months or so. In order to gain the money needed for my build, I plan on selling the two external hard drives that I own (500GB and 320GB). The 500GB is mostly movies with about 386GB used, and the 320GB external has 11GB used. The hard drive that is replacing these is a 1.5TB internal hard drive.

The trouble is, I can't put the information from those externals onto the 1.5TB internal because I'll have to reformat that internal when I install windows (when the new PC comes together).

Options:

- I have about 200GB free on the internal hard drive of my old computer. Could I compress all the information on both externals and fit them onto the spare 200GB without losing the quality of my movies?

- I heard something about partitioning the 1.5TB (actually about 1.3TB) into multiple amounts, like a 800GB partition and a 700GB partition....dump the stuff into the 800, install windows on the 700, transfer the stuff to the 700, then revert back to the full 1.3TB.................. but I have no idea how right this is or anything.

- I dump all the stuff from the externals onto the 1.5TB internal and install windows over that without reformatting.

- I wait to sell the externals until I have the rest of the computer and windows is already installed (my least favorite because I'd like the money).

Any help?? Thanks!

 

[twoeyes]

Using partition magic would be the easier way there. I doubt you could compress movies down to that size as they are probably already compressed.

 

[Khaydarin]

The movies are just ripped straight from DVDs using DVD Decryptor....

BUT how would you do the "partition magic"?

 

[Nenu]

You will get hardly any space back from material that is already compressed like movies and music.
There is little point in compressing drives unless its for game installs or documents etc (ie drives that will compress well).
However, the performance penalty and risk of losing data from simple errors isnt worth it.

The reason you are more prone to losing data is that uncompressed data has redundancy built in.
This redundancy is helpful in recovering data when there is a problem.

A fairly small error can cause a loss of much more data when it is compressed if the error is too large to be corrected by the built in error correction.
This is because data compression works best on larger data blocks so an error can nuke a whole block of data. This in turn might be a part of a larger file which can also be irreparably damaged.
Compressed data isnt as easy to recover so data loss can occur where it previously wouldnt have.

 

[Joe Average]

If he's running Vista he needs to avoid Partition Magic (commercial disk partitioning software) at all possible costs because it will destroy his Vista installation. It hasn't been updated in nearly 4 years now, it will wreck the bootloader for Vista because it is simply 100% incompatible with Vista installations, so please, don't recommend that application anymore.

Parted Magic is totally free software, does everything anyone could need done with respect to disk partitioning, and is totally Vista compatible and won't wreck the bootloader. This is the product that people should be recommending if partitioning is required and a third party tool is what they prefer to use.

Even if the OP is using XP, I seriously would not recommend Partition Magic ever again, for anything. It's pretty much a dead product for Symantec, they've simply ignored it and it's still at version 8.05 and has been for almost 4 years now, with not one update in all this time.

www,partedmagic.com <<<--- That's the only one that matters right now. Highly recommended, if needed at all since Vista can do quite a bit with respect to partitioning.

 

[Khaydarin]

I'll look at Parted Magic. Just so you know, I'll be installing XP Pro on the new PC instead of Vista. Since I don't have time to look at the program right this second, is it easy to use? I've never split up hard drives or partitioned them like I plan to before.

EDIT>> I just found this video. So I could 1) split the hard drive up into two parts, 2) move all the stuff from the two externals to one side, install XP Pro onto the other side, 3) move all the data (from the externals) to the new XP Pro side, 4) erase the now-empty half from which I just transferred the information (from the externals), and 5) expand the XP Pro side to fill the rest of the hard drive. Sound about right?