Questions about hard drive compression?

Question

1. Does it slow down your system significantly? If so, by how much (%)?

2. Does it make it harder to retrieve data if something goes wrong (such as a drive crash)?

3. Can you compress a drive with data in it? Or does it only work for empty drives?

4. Please tell me if this will work:
I have two drives, C is where Windows is installed, E is an empty drive. I'm going to compress E drive, copy the entire C drive and then paste it into E drive. Then format the C drive, and compress it for future data storage. Now the computer has to boot up from the E drive, can the computer automatically boot from E drive or do I have to do something? I'm using XP.

Thanks.

Answer 1

1) Yes, it slows down your system. You probably won't notice the slowdown too much but it depends on your system.

2) Yes, but if your drive crashes you're pretty much screwed anyway.

3) Yes, it works with drives with data already in it (from the applications I know of).

4) There's more to it then that. I don't think that will work but I don't know enough to explain why.

Compressing the entire hard drive is very rare nowadays. I remember I used to do it when I had a 200MB hard drive but when we started getting into the GBs compression is usually avoided. Most people now talk about encryption instead.

Storage space is cheap and your hard drive is your biggest bottleneck. So no need to unnecessarily slow down your system.

You could always archive your files using ZIP,RAR,etc instead.

Answer 2

Hunh? As cheap as a new BIG hard drive is--why would you screw around with compression?

To boot from the E drive, just change your BIOS.

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Answer 3

Hi. I would only use compression as a last resort. Sometimes it works fine, sometimes not so fine. Much better, in my opinion, to get a larger capacity drive.