I've gotten a shiny new computer with just a 60gb SSD, and I don't store much media so it hasn't been a problem... until I bought a game pack that needs 50gb+ to install. With hard drive prices and my wallet as it is, I cannibalized my old laptop for its slow, 5400rpm drive.
I'm wondering if the performance will be better or worse if I compress it. Specifically, I'm hoping I can use this effect, considering that I rarely max out more than 2 of my 4 cores.
Compressing and decompressing a file is processor intensive task (varies a lot depending on file sizes and how frequently files are created/modified).
I dont think compression is going to improve performance.(My guess is it will worsen it)
So i think you would be better off with slow 5400 rpm drive.
Best Practices for NTFS Compression
According to this article by Microsoft,
NTFS Compression is heavily reliant on CPU performance. Yet, repeated read/writes would drastically influence performance as well.
It depends on how fast your processor is and how slow the drive is. If your CPU can compress/decompress the data faster than the drive can read/write the uncompressed data then that is the way to go.
You should also consider whether the program you are using stores its data in compressed format. If it does then trying to compress/decompress it will result in even worse performance. Given that huge amount of data it uses there is a good chance that the data is stored compressed. Check with software makers or the games forums
I've asked this question before and my conclusion is to buy some RAM and use a ram disk. Most likely it's possible to add 6 or 8 GB ram. This will speed up Windows 7 a lot. Then you can get a good ram disk that can handle images and save the most accessed file to the ram disk. You can link the folder if you can't change the path. You can find out the most accessed file with procmon.exe. Here is the link to my question https://superuser.com/questions/371379/how-can-i-compress-my-system-drive-in-windows-7. Unfortunately is was closed but I posted a link from tomshardware where there was a benchmark. In short compression can help a bit. Here is the link from tomshardware http://www.tomshardware.de/ssd-komprimierung-betriebssystem,testberichte-240895.html.
Yes, compression can increase performance. These days with Intel Haswell and AMD Richland CPUs, we have super computers on our laps. Implementing disk-wide NTFS compression on your system drive will increase performance because the processor will decompress the file very very quickly.
Compressing a file reduces the size on the disk, thus the disk reads the file quicker, and the additional time taken to decompress the file in the CPU is very small, thus you have a net performance increase. But if you have an SSD then not worth it. Slow mechanical drive, absolutely yes, do it.
I don't believe compression will gain you much. Typically the files that take the lot of space are movies and music. These compress very poorly and therefore will be lost work.
But especially movies are usually played rarely and can easily be stored on a slow drive. If you really need to get that little extra speed you could move these on your slow drive and place a link instead on your SSD. (unfortunately I don't know exactly how to do this in Win 7)
