Solved Compress Hard Drive

Taliseian · Oct 27, 2023

Good morning,

My current Games SSD is a 1g Samsung 860 EVO and it's getting close to full. I've seen that Windows can compress files on the hard drive, but I'm curious as to if the process is worth it. Has anyone else compressed their secondary/games hard drive and what kind of performance did you get?

Thanks...

Penny K · Oct 27, 2023

Never compress the whole drive, just compress a folder.

cereberus · Oct 27, 2023

Penny K said:
Never compress the whole drive, just compress a folder.

Huh - a compressed folder is a zip file. You cannot use files directly in same way as a normal folder.

cereberus · Oct 27, 2023

Taliseian said:
Good morning,

My current Games SSD is a 1g Samsung 860 EVO and it's getting close to full. I've seen that Windows can compress files on the hard drive, but I'm curious as to if the process is worth it. Has anyone else compressed their secondary/games hard drive and what kind of performance did you get?

Thanks...

If you compress a drive, files have to be uncompressed on the fly - depending on lots of factors, performance may be reduced - hard to be specific. Only way to find out is try it - you can always decompress files afterwards.

However, people have had issues with compressed folders where something glitches and drive gets corrupted. Sure this can happen on any drive but if uncompressed, you have a higher chance of recovering data.

Only compress folders individually if you rarely use them - then you need to decompress folders to use them, and you would make storage worse.

In the end, the best options are

1) delete files or move lesser used files to another drive

2) buy another (preferably bigger) drive.

GaryW · Oct 27, 2023

I have used compressed drives for several years on data drives (never on a system drive). I have never had a drive problem caused by compression as far as I know, but it is possible. I don’t consider it a problem though. My data backed up a variety of ways and in different locations. I use the built in disk compression located under properties.

Bree · Oct 27, 2023

Penny K said:
Never compress the whole drive, just compress a folder.

cereberus said:
Huh - a compressed folder is a zip file. You cannot use files directly in same way as a normal folder.

No, Penny K does not mean compressing to a .zip. You can apply ntfs compression to an individual folder and its contents, but it remains a normal folder.

Compress or Uncompress Files and Folders in Windows 11 Tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to compress or uncompress a file or folder with NTFS Compression in Windows 10 and Windows 11. The NTFS file system volumes support file compression on an individual file basis. The file compression algorithm used by the NTFS file system is Lempel-Ziv...

www.elevenforum.com

Spunk · Oct 27, 2023

The cost of SSD's are coming down in price and increasing in capacity. There really is no reason to compress a drive. Replacing the drive with a larger one is preferred.
If budget is a major concern, then if the drive is not a Windows System drive, compressing that drive would be a temporary solution. If there is one folder that is a space hog, then compress that folder as stated.

Ed Tittel · Oct 27, 2023

Last week, I bought a Crucial P3 (PCIe 3.0: 3000-3,500 max read/write speeds) 2TB NVMe for US$70 (it was on sale, now $82). But still, @Spunk is absolutely right. Slowly but surely, I plan to replace all of my 1TB boot/system NVMes with 2TB drives.
HTH,
--Ed--

Taliseian · Oct 27, 2023

Thanks for the good advice all - will mark thread as solved. I won't compress but will save up for a larger games drive and just uninstall what I'm not currently playing.

Please, don't let the discussion go if there is more to say.