is it good to compress drives?

**mp3MaStA88** · July 23rd, 2005, 07:23 PM

I have 2 hard drives one of which i just installed windows corporate edition(skinned to the bone) and another hard drive with all of my main stuff on it. My question is, is it good to compress these hard drives or no? because when i check in the properties of the hard drives, it gives me the option to compress the drives, YES or NO??:icon_comp :icon_boun :icon_comp

**Sephiroth** · July 23rd, 2005, 08:05 PM

although you might gain some space, youll take a performance hit because everything you do on the hard drive has to be uncompressed into memory and the pagefile. By compressing the drive youll fragment it to hell.

So no its not worth it.

**mp3MaStA88** · July 23rd, 2005, 08:28 PM

so basically i would be messing up my computer?:icon_scra

**Sephiroth** · July 23rd, 2005, 08:45 PM

youd be making it go slower which is not the ideal thing to do.

**mp3MaStA88** · July 23rd, 2005, 10:14 PM

alright so i won't do it then! and now i have installed PCBSD on my f: drive and don't know how to do a dual boot! I have winxp corp ed w/ sp2 incorperated in it and I don't know how to boot the PCBSD core, can you help sephiroth

**Sephiroth** · July 23rd, 2005, 10:34 PM

Linux and that variety of OS have always been a pain in the ass to install which is why i dont use it.

Maybe you should have installed the linux boot loader if you want to select a different OS even though they are annoying IMO which is another reason why i dont use linux.

Also you might want to consider getting a legal verison of XP, sometime in the future too.

**mp3MaStA88** · July 24th, 2005, 10:45 AM

ok, thanks, i think i will check out the forums or something on wireless usb, at the PCBSD website!

**truelyme** · July 26th, 2005, 12:50 AM

Compressing drives isn't worth it. Not only as Sephiroth mentioned, you take a hit on speed for the compression/decompression times but you don't really gain that much in space either. It takes a bit of the drive sectioned off as the area to work with which to compress and decompress. That eats into what you would gain on compression making the end result minimal. One would think that bigger drives would gain from compression but it doesn't seem to work out that way.

For a little time I was running dual boot with XP and Linux. Make sure that XP is on the drive first before installing the Linux. I found that Linux gave me the choice right up front to do a dual boot, but that was with Red Hat. Ubuntu, which I am using on this machine didn't. It would have to be done through the partitioning.

I haven't been at the Linux that long and there are some folks here that are pretty much authorities at it. There is a section lower down in the forums here on computers, inside is a place dedicated to Linux. Ask there for some knowledgable help.