Under what circumstances would windows NTFS file compression be unsuitable???

Question

I read on support./microsoft that file compression can be detrimental to performance in some cases... I cant imagine what cases however!!!


Anybody care top shed some light??

Answer 1

It is detrimental when any kind of disk performance is critical. For example, it is a bad idea to use NTFS compression on a file server because both the disk and the processor will be taxed any time the file is read or written. If the file is archived, and rarely accessed, it would be okay to use NTFS compression, but even in that case, I would tend to use ZIP or something to compress because it will usually compress better.

Answer 2

Tealcisgod ... Without going into all the technical details, think about what's happening. The compression and decompression aren't occurring by magic; your processor is fully involved and having to perform all this extra processing in order to handle the compressed disk environment you've created.

Since storage and hard drives are so inexpensive these days, if you can manage it, I'd add another hard drive or upgrade the one you have and stop using compression. Good luck with it.

Answer 3

If you're doing some process that involves a LOT of reading/writing to the disk, the compression and decompression overhead can have a huge impact on the performance.

Answer 4

File compression severely affects the performance of reading/writing because Windows needs to compress or uncompress the file before it can be read or written.

Answer 5

On some dual boot systems if one of the systems does not support NTFS.
http://www.bcpl.net/~dbryan/ntfs-dual-boot.html

Answer 6

size, partition too small old operating system, legacy software that doesn't recongize that format