To compress or not?

A

aiken

n00b
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Mar 8, 2005
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14
I'm running an AMD nforce4 system with two 80GB 10k SATA drives for the OS on the si3114 controller in a RAID 1 config, and two 400GB 7200 SATA drives in RAID 1 on the nf4 controller. It's a nice system, and quick.

However, I'm wondering if I'd get better performance compressing the system drive. Space isn't an issue, but it seems to me that with a fast CPU, the overhead of decompression may more than offset the fact that less actual data is transferred from disk to memory, meaning fewer sectors read, which should be quicker.

A quick google hasn't turned up anything substantive. Has anyone seen benchmarks on how compression affects real world performance, and how that relationship changes with disk and CPU speed? Or do I have to do it myself?

Cheers
-b
 
That's certainly the conventional wisdom, but I'm looking for benchmarks. The way I see it, the slowdown will be in CPU time, which at this point is a lot less expensive than disk time. I'm curious if anyone's actually tested it since the days of 386's and NT 3.5 and such. It seems to me that it may no longer be true.

Cheers
-b
 
If your theory is that compression will make it quicker, why not try it yourself and post the results.

Seriously, the negative issues that arrise with using volume compression far outweigh any possible advantage.
 
It looks like I'm going to have to run numbers myself. It'll be a few days, but I'll post 'em here. My expectation is that conventional wisdom will hold true and it will be slower, but in the absence of real numbers, I've got my doubts. Only one way to find out for real, then.

Cheers
-b
 
aiken said:
It looks like I'm going to have to run numbers myself. It'll be a few days, but I'll post 'em here. My expectation is that conventional wisdom will hold true and it will be slower, but in the absence of real numbers, I've got my doubts. Only one way to find out for real, then.

Cheers
-b
Click to expand...

I look forward to seeing the results you post.

Thanks
 
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