Win7 Drive Compression

[DougWD]

Win7 x64
Drives: All NTFS

I'm not too knowledgeable about Win7 compression and the documentation is fairly sparse.

First, I do not have an option to "compress drive" on any of my HDs except those that are "active." This is the curious part. Anyone know why this is?

 

[bigdogchris]

Do not use that check box unless you want a significant performance overhead on your system. It will compress the entire drive, which for OS/Application drive is not a good idea. I don't even know why it's available for C:\

 

[nessus]

Do not use that check box unless you want a significant performance overhead on your system. It will compress the entire drive, which for OS/Application drive is not a good idea. I don't even know why it's available for C:\

The compression algorithms are way faster than disk platter speeds.

Compression is available for all NTFS partitions. To engage the compression logarithms for a particular file, its just a file attribute. Been that way since NT 3.5...

If you are compressing a large number of not very compressible files, it will fragment the drive quite a bit at first until the regularly scheduled weekly defrag gets things back in better order.

If you are wanting to compress an SSD to maximize available space you might be better off just selecting directories you know have a lot of data that will compress well. You can also always use the "Compact" command line command to just compress file types you know will compress well.

 

[DougWD]

The problem was one of formatting. I deleted the volumes and reformatted and now the options to compress are there.