Free up hard drive space without deleting a single file (XP/Vista/Windows 7)
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March 12th, 2008 at 1:41 am
[...] Free up hard drive space without deleting a single file (XP and Vista) [...]
March 12th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
You should mention that your disk needs to be using an NTSF file system. on most modern XP (or better) machines, most people probably won’t encounter anything older, but some of us have older drives that we’ve imported in from older machines to have secondary storage that are still formatted at FAT32. (yeah, one of these days, I’ll transfer all my music off of there and onto a new, shiny, NTSF-formatted drive, but in my situation, and for primarily storing *just* a collection of mp3s, using an old 80-gig FAT32 is serviceable… but it won’t compress as a function of the operating system, naturally.
March 13th, 2008 at 1:06 am
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you
March 13th, 2008 at 11:53 am
It’s called NTFS compression.
April 1st, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Really? You’re recommending disk compression? Sorry to burst the bubbles of anyone reading, or who has read this, but compressing and decompressing on the fly DOES use system resources, and DOES cause slowdown… unsurprisingly, if you think about it (duh). If you need to clear up 7 whole GB that bad, go buy a new hard drive. The money will be well spent against storage woes, and the aggravation of slow, historically /unreliable/ disk compression.
(By Horus’ eye, I could hardly believe I was reading this article, and that “everyone should use” this feature. Bad, bad, bad advice, you should be ashamed.)
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:53 pm
it is NTFS lol NTSF
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:31 pm
I have made the change. Honestly on my system, there was nothing noticeable. If you experience anything noticeable on your computer, please let me know. This is why I do not recommend compressing entire drives and system files
April 12th, 2008 at 10:37 am
I compressed a 125 GB D: drive (virtual memory — all music) with no noticeable effect — except the file name turned blue!
=;-}
April 25th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Good advice actually. When I install a new system I always enable compression when creating volumes/partitions that will store non-system files and documents and installers. But if you plan to store only mp3s and xvid/divx movies on the drive there’s no use to enable compression as it can’t compress it any further. It doesn’t slow the system as like you said decompression is done on the fly and it will actually be a little efficient since it will only read fewer bytes on the hard disk as compared to the uncompressed one. BUT, it will be slower if you copy a file from an uncompressed drive/folder and vice versa, but faster if from and to compressed drives/folders because it has fewer bytes to copy.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:56 am
I compressed the whole C: drive (with the operating system on it) on my old computer by right clicking the drive and selecting the option to compress. I have been able to boot up with no problems for years. It didn’t sabotage my computer as you said it would.
@Duane Lampe: If the feature is there, why not use it? Who would go and buy Netscape Navigator and pay good money when you’ve got Internet Explorer on the OS for free (or when you can download other browsers off the net at no cost) ?
June 9th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Hello, i’m doing this rgiht now but i have one question. When it compresses what does it really change and if nothing changes but the folder going blue then how come it isnt normally like that to save disk space? I just hope it works because I want to download a game and i dont have much space so… and im using it on a folder full of pictures. is that okay??
July 1st, 2008 at 11:25 pm
When you compress a file, it means that every time you open it, it will have to decompress. You should not compress game files because that will have an effect on loading time.
July 8th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
So are you saying that you cannot compress videos and mp3 files? Basically just document files? I have an e-library that is 55GB So I definitely will use it for this, but I also have 77GB worth of movies, etc. :/ I’m a packrat even on my computer…sadness…
July 8th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
Not cannot but should not. You can try it, it will take a while, but from the 77GB, you will save maybe 1 or 2 GB (maybe even less). I don’t suggest it. It could also cause problems when the files are moved onto an MP3.
July 9th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Local disk(C:)
Used space….7.68 mb
Free space….159 kb
Capacity……7.84mb
if anyone can help me with this it would be great. i can not download any files to my c drive with out it saying i need to free up space on my drive. there is hardly any thing on my c drive. i just need to get more space one it…what should i do/ can i do anything. thanks.
July 13th, 2008 at 7:19 am
I hope this works cuz i have got so less disk space
August 3rd, 2008 at 6:20 pm
From a pure computer science point of view, Compressing will affect your computer. It will work best on document and other file formats that can be compressed. What it generally will not do is make mp3’s or videos smaller, these are already in a compressed file format so will make little difference.
There are some cases where compressing lots of smaller files can actually end up making the archive bigger as it has to keep track of what is compressed.
As its been said, if you are really desperate for more space, burn stuff to disk, delete things or heaven forbid by a new disk.
“(For anyone that believes this claim is false, I specifically looked this up through many sources, and having tested it myself, it does not produce any slowdowns)”.
Of course it can otherwise the entire thing couldn’t run! How exactly could it run if this wasn’t the case? It will call a function to decompress the file if the operating system calls it.
All it adds is another layer between the disk and the os where the entire file needs to be loaded decompress and then actioned. this will take longer the less ram the system has and the bigger the file is.
September 13th, 2008 at 9:48 am
Compression in most cases will NOT slow up the computer and in some cases will make it faster. This is counter-intuitive, but those saying it will slow the computer up are not looking at the total picture.
Yes, the computer will take more processing time because of the need to decompress/decompress, but processing speed is very fast. It will take less time to load/unload the file because the file is smaller (compressed). Because disk loading speed is relatively slow and processing speed is fast, you actually win or have a tie when you look at the total time required to compress/uncompress.
Don’t look at just processing time in isolation.
September 13th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Greg I think you probably hit it on the point. Although I’m not as familiar with this as I am with the other features, I’m almost 100% sure using this feature will only be a win-situation providing you followed my warnings and recommendations.
October 14th, 2008 at 5:27 am
hi
i added a 2nd hard drive to my pc and for a week it worked fine but on the 2nd one when i added it i compressd it and today i was useing my MP3 player and and all the songs it started jumping/cutout for 1/10 of a sec so i turn it off and i take the 2nd one out and now it works fine could that be what it is the main drive was not compresed
and i got one more thing to ask on the if i can i was told that the dasktop uses ram not the HD if i was to move lets say a 6gb folder to dasktop would i get slowdowns i keep it clear only thing that is there is doc. my comp recyele bin and network places and internet exp. i use windows XP any help would help thx
October 14th, 2008 at 10:47 am
I have a HP windows xp 2800+ 2.08GHz, 960MB of Ram. For the past 2 weeks it has been warning me of low disk space on D drive. I couldn’t figure out why this happened all of a sudden when I barely use this computer other then to play games or check emails, occassional word documents and photos. I was so frustrated not knowing what happened that I restored to factory settings and needless to say, that didn’t correct anything. From one day to the next (literally) my disk space is even lower. Can anyone help me figure this out. I’ve performed disk cleanups on both C and D drive several times and nothing! I’ve checked for unwanted files and I dont see anything, especially since I’ve rebooted the system back to factory, wiping out everything I had. I did reinstall my printer and camera and since noticed the space is even lower. Don’t know how that plays such a BIG part in this issue but just thought I’d throw that in there. I always clear my caches at the end of each day so that is clear as well. The D drive is reporting to have used space 3.82GB and Free Space 646MB with a capacity of 4.45GB
Seeking help,
Mimi
November 23rd, 2008 at 2:06 pm
you people are stupid, i have everything but my OS compressed and nothing is wrong at all, i play Call Of Duty 4, Halo 2, Crysis Warhead, etc just fine with them compressed, whoever thinks windows compression will hurt your files is an idiot… the only kind of compression that would nessecarily “hurt” your files would be non-system compression such as .zip, .rar, .7z, etc… even then, all you have to do is unzip it to retrieve your files, but i do not recommend compressing large files as .zip because it is not lossless compression, windows compression is lossless and so is .rar… so learn the facts before you post
December 2nd, 2008 at 12:26 am
Delete the old system restore snapshots that you no longer need. This spared a few Gigs on my hard drive.
December 8th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Mark is also stupid, as he claims that .zip compression is lossy.
Please try to zip any file, any size and then unzip it to another location. Next do a bit by bit comparison with FC if you like scary command lines. Otherwise use Total Commander for the job. If the to files are different you are in desperate need of a computer repair. At a time in the past i have been running XP from a compressed drive with no problems at all. The gain in space however is negliable given the price on harddrives today
December 13th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
The only thing we use compression for is backups. For example, our new Dell top line server has some 590+ gig on its main drive, but our Dell RD1000 backup drives are 320 gig max. Of course, we soon outstriped the backup. I was about to get into swapping drives in the RD1000, and compressing the drive solved everything. Personally, I would prefer that Dell make cartridges for the RD1000 that match at the least the Server drives, but this got around the problem. The occasional file recover has worked withtout incident, and the RD1000 is SO much better than tapes.
December 26th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Just a note, and a thought, pack jamming your computer full until you need to compress in order to download more stuff is a bad bad idea. Your computer needs space to run properly, and jam packed drives do not make could processors. How are you running apps and such without space on the drive? I’m speaking of the main OS C: (Or whatever) drive, the one you boot off of and run important apps off of. Go to walmart or other department store of your choosing and buy an external, easily attachable drive for under $50 bucks and transfer some files.
$50- will buy you an extra 60 - 80 GB (Seagate 80gb SATA)
$70-$80 - will buy you an extra 320 or so GB (WD’s MyBook)
It’s worth it to free up the computer to run better and faster! You won’t need compression then! Also, I have easily run programs off of external drives - even Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, by formatting the drive to NTFS! So, you can format the external hard-drive to NTFS (while it’s still empty!) I have (2) 80-GB SeaGates I bought for $39 a piece and (1) 320GB MyBook’s(WD) I bought for $77 from Walmart (I know, we’re suppose to hate them, I can’t afford not to shop there though).
January 17th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
My computer has 80 Gb space. I have seven partitions of 10.6 GBs. My C drive is 10.6 Gbs out of which 4.89 Gbs are the programs in C drive. My computer shows i have 3.21 Gbs still free. If we total the programs i.e. 4.89 Gbs and the free space of 3.21 Gbs the answer is 8.1 Gbs, where is the rest of 2.5 Gbs as it is not shown by windows in my computer properties. Can any one help me here to have a clue of this problem. I am anxiously waiting. Thanks
January 20th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Edit: My original comment was wrong and I apologize for my lack of research and knowledge on the topic. 1GB does = 1024MB and the accumulation will show up as a lower gigabyte number
January 21st, 2009 at 1:41 pm
You should warn your users about the increase in disk failure and data corruption when using compression.
I can just picture all the non-tech readers killing their hard drives in the next month or so on your good advice.
January 21st, 2009 at 1:46 pm
“For example, if you buy a 500GB HD, you will only get about 470GB. The rest of the space is used for setting up partitions and whatnot. If you’re thinking how these companies are able to get away with this, well technically you are still using some of that space =\”
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. The reason is that there is this “missing space” is that hard drive manufacturers define 1 gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes but your computer defines 1 gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte#Consumer_confusion
January 21st, 2009 at 2:07 pm
“If you’re worried about slowdowns in decompressing, there won’t be any because Windows Explorer is able to decompress on the fly. (For anyone that believes this claim is false, I specifically looked this up through many sources, and having tested it myself, it does not produce any slowdowns)”
Your claim is false. You can’t change the laws of physics, and Information Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory) requires the process of decompression to use extra energy/clock cycles/etc.
I mean, just think about it. In order to “decompress on the fly”, Windows Explorer has to branch to code that performs the actual decompression. If the file wasn’t compressed, it wouldn’t have to do that. The extra code is going to take time to process (as we don’t have near instantaneous quantum computing yet) … and as a result, the time it takes to work with a compressed file will be longer than an uncompressed file.
That’s just plain common sense (oh, and required by the laws of physics).
Now, what you *might* have meant to say is that “The amount of time required to decompress a file is negligible - it happens so fast you won’t notice.”
In short: there *will* be a slowdown, but you probably won’t notice unless you’re dealing with very, very large compressed files.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:11 pm
It doesn’t necessarily slow down your machine when reading a compressed file. It wont if… your processor can read and decompress a compressed file (say 5meg) in less time than it can read an uncompressed file (say 10 meg) from disk. (think about it) If you had infinite CPU power compressed files would be read twice as fast. So it is a balance between disk reading (which is likely to be the bottleneck) and CPU power
January 21st, 2009 at 2:17 pm
“Before you compress a drive, I just want to remind you to NEVER compress any drive with an operating system on it. Doing so will make your computer unbootable.”
You can still boot if your system drive is compressed it just takes 5-10 minutes to load windows. I’ve “fixed” several computers that were taking an atrocious amount of time to boot because of this. Usually, this happens because someone is running low on disk space so windows runs Disk Cleanup and one of the options is to enable disk compression. I don’t know why it lets you do this because the system is pretty much slow as molasses if you do it.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:17 pm
This article also fails to mention that when you use NTFS compression, you can NOT use most file system repair utilities to fix a file system in case of a major crash. Most do not deal well with NTFS compression.
Also, the claim of no performance degradation is an out and out falsehood. You will ABSOLUTELY see performance degradation. This is DIRECTLY from the mouth of Microsoft and my vast experience with Windows and MS products.
The other thing that is not mentioned is that 80+% of files on your disk are already compressed. Almost all media type files are compressed in some way shape or form as well as 100% of DLL’s and executables. Also most application data files have some degree of native compression.
what this means is that when you use them on a compressed file system you will gain less than 5% benefit from trying to recompress them. Recompression also creates a gigantic file I/O performance hit.
whoever wrote this article needs to get their facts straight before talking people into doing something that is ridiculous.
when you can buy a 500gb HD for less than 100 dollars there is abolutely no reason to be using this compression and you certainly should not use it on an entire drive.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Baleegh, that’s probably due to that darned System Restore, for some odd reason whatever is in there (the system volume information hidden folder) doesn’t register correctly as being “used”.
Just turn it off, it should automatically clear the System Volume Information hidden folder and you should get back a LOT of space.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Oh and there IS an official name for this compression. It is called NTFS native volume compression.
Who lets these people who are clueless write articles?
January 21st, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Oh and one last thing to Greg, you have no idea what you are talking about.
It is YOU who is not looking at the total picture. Yes the file can be read into RAM faster ins ome cases due to the smaller size. What you failed to mention is, when not compressed entire files are almost never read into RAM compltetely.
when you action a compressed file the entire file has to be read into RAM so you waqste more physical and virtual memory and you actually spend MORE time opening and closing the file because you had to load the entire 700MB file into RAM so it can be decompressed instead of opening whatever portion fo the file needs to be read at the time.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Albert, your answer is not correct. A hard disk formatting to smaller than advertised size has NOTHING to do with formatting or partition tables.
The reasont his happens is because your Hard Disk manufacturer advertises decimal gigabytes (1000MB=1GB) when the REAL way Windows addresses the hard disk is in binary GB (1024MB=1GB). binary disk sizing is the proper way to list disk size not in decimal.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Trying to compress files that are already in a compressed format (pdf, mp3, video, etc.) won’t buy you much. There is something called as Shannon’s entropy that puts an absolute limit on lossless compression. Since bulk of my data is music and videos I let the applications handle the compression/uncompression and not worry about compression at the file system level. That said it is still good for files that are stored in uncompressed formats.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Ok, you’re a little bit wrong on what is actually going on here. Explorer is not doing the decompressing. NTFS compressions is lower, at the file system driver, which is loaded up before any of the user level processes load. It is transparent to all processes that access it via the normal file system pathways. You can compress most every file on your NTFS volumes, including system files, and be fine. I’m a little unsure of the paging file.
There is a performance hit but you’re trading one hit for another. They say drive access is “1000x slower” than RAM access. That might be an old comparison. But, drives are measured in “ms” increments and RAM in “ns”. So, maybe 1000x is still valid. You spend a smaller amount of time on the slower channel and them move it into the faster one. Deciding if the entire thing is slower or faster is going to vary by file.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Actually the problem is that hard drive manufacturers advertise the storage in base 10 where a gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 bytes, when in fact it’s base 2, which brings it to 1,073,741,824 bytes.
They coined terms for those as well..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiB
I don’t think that terminology will catch on in common speech however.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:36 pm
If you buy a 500GB HD you will only have about 470GB because of a difference in units.
The harddrive manufactures use this definition of gigabyte:
1 GB = 1,000,000,000 Bytes (this is 1000 * 1000 * 1000)
whereas Windows uses this:
1 GB = 1,073,741,824 Bytes (this is 1024 * 1024 * 1024)
therefore a “Windows GB” is larger than a “harddrive manufacturer GB”.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:39 pm
How can you claim that the compression has no impact on performance yet you should not compress game files because there may be an impact on performance?
January 21st, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Albert I’m sorry but your advice is misleading on so many levels. You are an IT amateur trying to give expert opinion and advice.
“No specific name for this feature” — The name of this feature is NTFS compression.
You say NTFS compression makes no different to drive performance, but advise not to compress games as it increase load times dramatically? Compressing word documents (like your 30% compression example) and other user data will give good compression ratios. Attempting to compress already compressed files such as MP3’s or compressed video with give no benefit and just increase load times.
You can compress the system partition no problem, but you’ll probably suffer performance issues and long boot-up times.
Windows Explorer doesn’t do any compression/decompression. A much more low level kernel driver will perform these tasks for you. This is why compressed files/folders are accessible by all programs in windows.
The reason a 500GB drive only shows 465GB is because drive manufacturers assume 1K = 1000 bytes. Whilst your OS will use 1K = 1024bytes. Nothing to do with partitioning, sigh.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:40 pm
@Mark, before you instruct others to “learn the facts before you post” maybe you should drink your own kool aid. The only “losses” that may be present in ZIP are NTFS security descriptors and file modification times. There is no binary data loss what so ever in regards to the data stored within that file. ANY compression you use can increase your chances of being more impacted by data loss. Let’s say a bit changes in a file while on the hard disk, a text file would be minimally impacted by this under most circumstances, however, modify a bit in a compressed text file, then see where that leaves you, likely with an entire document being destroyed, versus one letter in the uncompressed text file. You can verify this yourself in any hex editor.
As far as NTFS compression not causing any slowdown or noticeable impact, I believe this is more a statement of opinion rather than fact. If this were the case, it would be enabled by Microsoft as a default. You may not notice it in most circumstances but I’d have done some benchmarking before making that statement myself. Everything is a trade off, you can’t get something for nothing, it’s the way the world works. I’m pretty sure that there would in fact be significant slow down in the following scenario, accessing a binary file randomly that’s larger than the amount of memory you have. One of two things has to occur, 1.) The file will be uncompressed and rewritten to disk in it’s uncompressed state (slowdown, as the same read data must now be rewritten, as well as you may not have enough disk space for the file to be decompressed), 2.) The file is decompressed and held in memory (slowdown, as the file will be thrashed in and out of virtual memory).
Just my thoughts.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:41 pm
No, the real reason is 1KB = 1024 bytes and 1MB = 1024KB and 1GB = 1024MB, so a 500GB drive actually have at least 500,000,000,000 bytes, but once you do that 1024×1024x1024 math, you get 465.6 GB (divide 500,000,000,000 by 1024 three times).
You are right there are overheads, this is why usually you get a little bit of extra space, so your 500GB drive might actually have something like 500,027,350,000 bytes, the extra bytes are used for overhead and bad sectors. When a sector goes bad on a drive, the drive automatically swap the data into one of the reserved sectors, so you don’t lose data.
The hard drive companies are actually deceiving us, by using the mathematical number of 500GB when we are actually getting 465.6 GB in actual operating system numbers. This was done for advertising, because 465GB doesn’t sound as good as 500GB.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:52 pm
I compressed my entire C:\ drive on my old eeePC. It worked fine.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Anyone remember dblspace? =)
OT : I would argue that the vendors keep their word when they advertise 500 gb and whatnot. Its not like its their fault everyone needs a file system and partitions
There is 500 gb physically on the drive, you just have to spend some to be able to use the rest =).
January 21st, 2009 at 2:53 pm
No Albert, the difference between the size on the box and what you actually have is not “partitions and whatnot”. It is due to the different prefixes used by the manufacturers and the OS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
What this means is that hard disk drive manufacturers use the SI megabyte (10^6=1,000,000) while the OS uses the binary megabyte (2^20=1,048,576). So a hard drive advertised as 80 GB (in SI) actually has 76,29 GB listed by the OS (in binary).
This is pretty basic computer knowledge…
Back on topic, Greg is indeed right. The slowest component on a computer is the hard drive, so reduce the quantity of data to load and it should usually speed up the computer. Maybe not on CPU intensive tasks though (encoding?), not sure about that.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Ah, Albert’s answer was removed and I was too slow in my response!
January 21st, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Decent advice, with a very important exception!
You cannot compress, compressed files!
1. Most image files won’t compress (Especially JPG)
2. MP3 files won’t compress
3. Videos won’t compress (mostly! .. unless you’re dealing with an uncompressed AVI)
4. Zip / Rar / 7z .. etc .. those won’t compress, they are compressed ..
So bottom line here .. it’s not worth running this on your itunes folder, your picture folders or a folder where you store a bunch of archived files.
If you have a directory full of word docs or something along those lines, this is great.
January 21st, 2009 at 3:37 pm
“For example, if you buy a 500GB HD, you will only get about 470GB. The rest of the space is used for setting up partitions and whatnot. If you’re thinking how these companies are able to get away with this, well technically you are still using some of that space =\”
Nonsense. The master boot record containing the partition tables uses only 512 bytes of the disk.
The problem with disks being smaller than they’re advertised is that manufactures treat 1kb as 1000 bytes (1mb as 1000kb, 1gb as 1000mb, etc), while the rest of the world knows that 1kb is 1024 bytes, 1gb is 1024mb.
So while hard drive manufactures say 500gb = 500000000kb = 500000000000bytes, windows says that 500000000000bytes = 488281250kb = 488.28gb
Also, I point out that with file compression, if you encounter corruption/accidental deletion, it’s MUCH harder to recover.
January 21st, 2009 at 4:08 pm
This thread of comments is loaded with the most ignorance, stupidity, and outright misinformation I’ve ever seen. Let’s definitively address each point:
1. NTFS compression is a stop-gap measure, not a solution. NTFS runs optimally when it has at least 15% free space available. This is not only for the automatic/idle defrag routine, but for the general nature of NTFS transaction logging. If your available free space falls below 15%, it’s time to upgrade your hard drive.
2. Compressing system files will not make your system unbootable. NTFS compression is integrated in the NTFS kernel. Any Windows boot activity that accesses NTFS drives uses the NTFS kernel, thus making compression features instantly available.
3. NTFS compression is a performance zero-sum game. While you may gain I/O performance for a file compressed more than 50%, you will lose that improvement in CPU compression/decompression cycles. Additionally, with integrated drive caches of 8mb, 16mb, and even 32mb, the I/O gain is completely nullified leaving only the CPU penalty. Do not rely on NTFS compression for a performance boost. Period.
4. For any disk bigger than 8gb, NTFS is more efficient than FAT32. Avoid the FAT32 file system at all costs, unless you’re using a flash drive. NTFS scales better than FAT32 for larger disk capacities. NTFS is also organized to be better performing than FAT32 in both index lookups and the prevention of file fragmentation.
5. If you have an ancient 8gb or smaller hard drive, go buy a new one. Your sad old drive is at the end of its life and you’re risking data loss by continuing to use it. Use Acronis or any number of free disk cloning tools to transfer your OS and data to the new drive.
6. Transferring NTFS compressed files to non-NTFS file systems does not cause problems. Since compression functions are built into the NTFS kernel, file transfer operations are not affected by compression. Compression/decompression is a lower level system function that is not controlled by higher level file transfer operations. In other words, it’s “automagic.”
7. All file compression is lossless. Doesn’t matter if it’s NTFS, zip, or whatever. File compression’s priority is data integrity. There is no such thing as lossy file compression. Lossy compression only applies to media manipulation, such as JPEG and MPEG, where the priority is to use visual and auditory cheats to save space while fooling human senses into thinking the original details are there.
8. Drive capacity discrepancies are a result of calculation differences, not partition data occupation. Anyone who can’t figure this out is a straight-up grade-A moron. Hard drive manufacturers measure a gigabyte as 1 billion bytes. However, a gigabyte, as determined by strict binary rules, is 1,073,741,824 bytes, or 1kb^3. So when Maxtor comes out with a 320 billion byte hard drive, they market it as 320gb. But when Windows (or any other OS that measures gb as 1kb^3) examines the disk, it sees a maximum of 298gb (320,000,000,000 / 1,073,041,824 = 298.02~). Only a few megabytes are reserved for boot, partition, file index, logging and other overhead.
I’m amazed that the author of this article put forward as much false and outright bad information as he did without adequate research or general knowledge. Then again, considering the general ignorance of the people commenting on this article, I shouldn’t be surprised. Ignorant people only turn to the slightly less ignorant for help.
January 21st, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Jennifer: Almost all types of audio and video files are compressed, as are jpg images. Most other things are not compressed. Trying to zip-compress the compressed files will most likely make them slightly larger.
Baleegh: In addition to what Albert said, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte#Consumer_confusion
January 21st, 2009 at 4:13 pm
I had to laugh. I can’t believe someone is actually suggesting the use of Microsoft’s disk compression.
January 21st, 2009 at 4:17 pm
“For anyone that believes this claim is false, I specifically looked this up through many sources, and having tested it myself, it does not produce any slowdowns”
Tested it yourself is hardly scientific. How many machines did you test it on? How many different hardware configuations? You make very general statements about software decompression on the fly without providing us with any evidence to support your claim.
What are these other sources from which you make your bold claim?
Decompression takes resources. Nothing is for free.
January 21st, 2009 at 4:21 pm
I have read many of your comments on here and on Digg so there are a couple of things I’d like to address. I have also edited the article accordingly.
1) (For anyone that believes this claim is false, I specifically looked this up through many sources, and having tested it myself, it does not produce any slowdowns): This was really bad wording and it is common sense that decompressing and compressing files constantly will have a toll on the system regardless of how big or small of a degree it is. What I meant to say here is the taxation on the system is minimal if instructions are followed. Any taxation will be barely be noticable. This is why I did not recommend compressing files from games or programs.
2) I am aware that MP3s are already compressed because the original files will be FLAC or lossless format. Compressing these files again would result in minimal gains because you’re compressing a compressed file.
3) Using this will also affect the life of your hard drive because you are causing it to move more often. This is something important that I have missed, thanks for pointing it out.
January 21st, 2009 at 4:33 pm
actually, the reason you don’t get the advertised space is because the advertised space is calculated in base 10, but computers calculate storage in base 2.
in other words, 10^12=1,000,000,000,000 is one terabyte in base 10.
2^40=1,099,511,627,776 is one terabyte in base 2.
i believe baleegh is having a different problem. baleegh, it is likely that your missing space is used up by hidden files. you can elect to see hidden files in windows explorer, but usually hidden files are important system files.
the space may be taken up by system restore, whose size you can set in the system control panel.
the other possibility is that you are using vista, which creates “shadow copies” as backup. you can delete the shadow copies in the disk cleanup control panel.
January 21st, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Thanks for this article. I had no idea why all the files on my new drive were blue. I wish it had said something, but it’s Windows!
January 21st, 2009 at 4:37 pm
@Baleegh and Albert
You’re missing the main reason that the drives are not the same size as advertised. The companies sell the drives on the notion that a gigabyte is actually 10^9 bytes, or that 1000 bytes to a kilobyte, a 1000 bytes to a megabyte and so on. But since this numbers are actually based on a power of 2, there are 2^10 (1024) bytes in a kilobyte. While it’s true that some drives have extra partitions, this is the source of the apparent lack in space.
January 21st, 2009 at 4:38 pm
Beat me to it Brian
January 21st, 2009 at 4:50 pm
stay well clear of this function as it slows your computer down.. especially if you have an older machine with the slower hard drives and little RAM..
if you need space, clear you temp internet files, disable hibernation/system restore and delete temp files and uninstall software no longer used… but DO NOT COMPRESS YOUR HARD DRIVE. Every time the system needs to access a file, it will have to uncompress it first, then access it, then recompress it. on a modern computer this may not be as noticable, but why buy a fast pc only to slow it down?
January 21st, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Actually you are not exactly right I’m afraid Albert.
The reason the sizes are different has nothing to do with the partitioning. All partitioning information is stored in the MBR, which takes up a very small amount of space at the front of the disk, 512 bytes to be specific.
The reason for the lost space is because all manner of storage is advertised under the context that 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. This is not the context under which a computer sees 1GB. To a computer, 1KB = 1024 bytes, not 1000… 1MB = 1024KB, 1GB = 1024MB, and so on. So to a computer, 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024×1024x1024×1024). Since GB can go both ways depending on context, manufacturers get away with advertising the 1000x context and printing it specifically on the box, despite a computer not seeing it the same way. The proper term for the unit of storage is Gibibyte, and Tebibyte instead of Terabyte… however I don’t see these ever catching on, sound too much like characters on a Nick Kids show.
As for the article, this is a feature that has been around since Win98, if not earlier (I never used it before then) and it does indeed work. There *is* overhead, but with computers these days I’d doubt it would be anywhere near as noticeable as it used to be.
January 21st, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Looks like Brian beat me to it… took too long typing it up. =)
January 21st, 2009 at 5:02 pm
The reason NTFS compression works so well for your incomplete torrents is they are “sparse files.” The torrent program creates the file for writing, indicates the size, and starts writing to that filestream as the blocks come in. NTFS keeps track of which sectors were used. Sparse files end up highly fragmented (on XP at least). But if you want more torrents in your queue than your HDD can hold, its indispensable.
This sparce files feature of NTFS different than the compression it may use on the actual data. For actual data, it can apply a dictionary-type compression like lzw. This is great for text files. It is lossless, meaning no data is destroyed in the encoding or decoding. And it is very fast. And its been available for a long time, I think I’ve been using it since win2000.
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:37 am
This will only work for files which are compressible. The biggest files on most people’s computers these days are videos and images, which are already compressed, and hence will not compress further. This tip really isn’t going to help too many people.
January 23rd, 2009 at 7:30 pm
You would have fewer duplicate comments from people all trying to correct you (whether justified or not) if you hadn’t held back comments for moderation before being displayed.
April 3rd, 2009 at 2:34 am
????Free up hard drive space without deleting a single file (XP/Vista …
May 27th, 2009 at 10:26 pm
I used to compress my whole hard drive just after installing windows 98SE and I loved it and never had any problems with it. Back then the largest hard drive I had was 20 gigs.
I learned years ago if your going to use compression on your whole drive the best time to do it is right after you install the operating system and before all of your hard drive space is gone. Back then it was called DoubleSpace. While you would not get exactly double the hard drive space you would get perhaps 3/4 of that extra space added to your drive. Xp won’t report the drive size as getting bigger like it used to; A double spaced 10 gig would turn into a 20 gig, but it will report that your compressed volumes are decreased in size sometimes as much as half.. so it amounts to the same thing.
If you do use NTSF compression do it with a new hard drive and a new fast for today’s standards processor. I have had a machine compressed with a Dual Core Pentium 4 300 GHZ processor and a fast SATA drive, 4 gigabytes of Ram on XP 32 bit computer and there was no performance degradation that I could detect no matter what program or how many I was running. I never had any problems with corrupt files or system files.
WARNING: MAKE BACKUPS !
I haven’t had to use the NTSF compression too much but I am thinking about doing it to my this machine. But just for extra security I am going to back up my drive to an image using Ghost before I begin the compression. You don’t have to use Ghost or even make an image like I do but please back up the important files/folders/applications email etc that you want to save before compressing. Make sure if you don’t image the drive for easy restore, that you still have your Microsoft XP installation CD and Activation Key in good working condition. This is just in case something goes wrong and your system crashes during compression. After compressing your drive do continue to make some type of backup every time you have new files etc, you want to keep. I am not sure with XP if you can Uncompress the drive after compression and some people have reported problems with compression. Backups are essential.
All these people who say ‘Don’t Ever compress a drive’ and ‘I can’t believe someone is suggesting compressing a drive’ are full of hogwash. If you do it right and protect your files, you cannot go wrong. You may not get the added space you think you should get depending on the type and amount of files your compressing, but NTSF compression IS a trusted Microsoft tool made to work with your XP system and used correctly you should never have a problem with it.
I would like to thank the author for posting the article and may I suggest for a future article the many virtues of using a Ram Drive in today’s modern computers.. ( like using it to free up the 1/2 or 3/4 gigabytes of unused ram above 3 gigabytes on a 4 gigabyte system, by using the PAE switch in boot.ini … having a 768 megabyte ram disk using otherwise unused ram is a win win situation)