Quote:
Originally Posted by Jinto
The hdd is actually the speed bottleneck of a typical PC today. So compressing files can actually make things faster (decompressing does not use too much resources ... at least not that much that the RAM and CPU cannot handle it - very useful here are mulity core processors).
Still, I am against compression. But for another reason.
I wouldn't want to rely on compressed data, since it has a worse read/write error tolerance compared to uncompressed data. This is because the Shannon entropy will be raised significantly by compressing data. Which makes a possible loss of information all the worse.
For example if in your uncompressed video file a bit is flipped it may produce an ugly block when playing it back. Using compression such a flipped bit can make the whole video file useless (not decompressable anymore or very alterated when uncompressed).
|
I was mainly talking about NTFS compression... NTFS compression does not actually compresses the file in a different format, it transparently compress and decompress which could make it faster even if most laptops ship with slower 5400 RPM HD, which can make it faster. You have only mentioned compression not done by the filesystem (e.g. zip/rar/etc compression/decompression).
This is pretty much sums up what I was talking about with NTFS compression:
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Wikipedia
NTFS can compress files using a variant of the LZ77 algorithm (also used in the popular ZIP file format). Although read-write access to compressed files is transparent, Microsoft recommends avoiding compression on server systems and/or network shares holding roaming profiles because it puts a considerable load on the processor.
Single-user systems with limited hard disk space will probably use NTFS compression successfully. The slowest link in a computer is not the CPU but the speed of the hard drive, so NTFS compression allows the limited, slow storage space to be better used, in terms of both space and (often) speed. NTFS compression can also serve as a replacement for sparse files when a program (e.g. a download manager) is not able to create files without content as sparse files.
|
I tried NTFS compression on my older Macbook Pro with Vista and it gives me poor results and slow performance, mainly because I compressed the OS files which is not recommended... and also the CPU being taxed by the Anti-Virus software. It's safe to apply NTFS compression on Program Files and documents since they aren't being accessed as much as the system files, just don't apply NTFS compression to the whole HD, it's not a good idea.
Another thing to be careful with NTFS compression is that files will fragment more quickly, which can be the cause of slow performance. It's best to defragment the whole hard drive every week to avoid that.