how does compression work?

[joeypinter]

greetings all, is compressing the C drive a good thing or a bad thing? i hate doing things i think are good but turn out bad, sometimes things are better left alone. please let me know your thoughts on this. thanks

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

joeypinter

Viewing your screenshot, not only would I say it is a bad thing (trades performance loss for space gain), it is totally unnecessary!

You've got over 600GB free out of a 1TB drive -- you do NOT need to be messing around with drive compression.

If it were my PC, I'd be grateful Win10 was even working half-way decent and would leave it well enough alone.

ood Luck

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[joeypinter]

thank you for getting back to me. i have to agree with you, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.  the reason i'm asking about this is because i run a DAW (digital audio workstation) so i always want to find ways to increase the performance of my computer.

[WAWood]

OK, reasonable question ...

The two things I've found that gain performance, excluding faster video response in gaming, are (1) more memory, (2) using an SSD instead of an HDD.

The first will yield significant performance gains, but only if you're stuck with 1GB of system memory, or in some cases, 2GB.  Increasing that to 4GB will suddenly make a lot of system memory available, but increasing that beyond 4GB drops off gain rapidly -- unless you're running an app that can make use of lots of memory.

The second will yield noticeable gains -- so much so, that over time, I've put SSDs into all my PCs.  Yes, they are expensive for the larger ones, but my (old) HP Dv6 laptop gained a new life when I put a 500GB SSD in it to replace the HDD.  Now, it boots all but instantly and runs as fast as my desktop that has twice the memory.

Here is an HP thread with stuff you can do to gain performance in Win10:  HP PCs - Increasing System Performance and Maintaining Your Computer (Windows 10) | HP® Customer Sup...

Good Luck

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If my posts helped you, please click the Thumbs-Up symbol on the left of the Reply button to say thanks.
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[Zski]

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@joeypinter wrote:

thank you for getting back to me. i have to agree with you, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.  the reason i'm asking about this is because i run a DAW (digital audio workstation) so i always want to find ways to increase the performance of my computer.Nir

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Not me, but please forgive me for butting in.

There are several types of compression  All of them use system resources or your time at some point.

When HD's were far smaller and far more expensive it made sense to use HD/file compression when HD  crowding became a serious issue. Say at 80 to 90% HD capacity back when we paid $s per meg not gigs per $...  

Now most power users consider that their HD is getting crowded when the Hd is about 60% full and start archiving  old projects with file compression, deleting garbage and dupe files.  Or just taking things off line to a backup drive. We still do things to defeat it, just differently. 

With HD upgrading becoming more popular with even LT users, could that mean that we may get HD doors, and Dvd/HD exchange caddies more often? Like mem doors have been.

As the big guys here say, and how trends have been going, more mem, and SDD drives are the way to go. in fact they are getting bigger also. 50/50 bet that 4T SSD drives will appear in 2.5" M2 format by December this year. What's nice about them is that they dont slow down much till mostly full. Like 90%+

So yea, Compress a giveaway USB thumb drive, saves lost money, or less time sending compressed files to multiple USB/SD chips.  At that point your not woried about their system load, just your cash/time flow...

Compression works by replacing long repetitive data strings with markers, so when reading or writing those strings and markers have to reside in memory, to detected/disassembled, or reassembled to recreate that data. Thus using CPU time and Memory in a system that may already be overloaded at times. The higher the compression the higher the load. Some file formats are already precompressed to a degree, so sometimes the space gain for all of this work is nill.

To discuss coding comression or explaing about the types of file/HD compression, the programs that do it, it's history, and the like. Yea, I'll do it but by E-Mail only.

I'm Slavic, so Perrogi, Cabbage Rolls. and Potato Cakes are the nector of the gods to me.