windows XP question

[LCHIEN]

I got a 250 GB 2.5" HDD and installed it into a USB-SATA drive case.
It was recognized but I had to partition and format the drive thru control panel->Administrative tools->computer management->storage before it became a usable drive.

Everything works OK and I can install it on multiple computers except there's one oddity.
It appears on the list of drives on my computers except unlike all the other devices the name and letter appear in blue text rather than black text. So do any folders and files on the drive. I've never seen this before. you can see it in the attached pic but you have to look closely to see the blue.
Is it because I enabled compressed drive? or Why else?

[smorris]

Blue indicates that the drive is compressed.

[LCHIEN]

Answering my own question... I found a few replies on the net that all agree

The fact that your Drive letter is in blue, indicates that the Drive and the files have been compressed by Windows® XP...this could be as a result of a recent 'cloning' operation perhaps, or even a disc compression program ?


Anyone run a compressed drive? i guess you get more space but it can cost a bit of time.

Bad decision?

May not be effective if you have small files because of minimum file sector sizes. And probably not much use for JPEG files since they are already compressed. Lossless compression of lossy compressed (JPEG or MP3 or MP4) files is usually a fruitless waste of computer CPU cycles.

[LCHIEN]

Answering my own question again (god how i love talking to myself)
I decompressed the whole drive which just has 81 1200x1600 jpg files on it
and the used space went from 94.322 MB to 94.306 MB. (the compressed drive used more storage, slightly, although 75MB of this is apparently drive overhead).

Conclusion - don't compress a drive used to store mostly JPG or MPx files (because they are already compressed with a more efficient lossy compression algorithm).

I suppose you can compress files well like Word and other text-based files, but who has GBs of those?

[phi1l]

Anyone run a compressed drive? i guess you get more space but it can cost a bit of time.

Bad decision?

If you have a lot of really small files, they get packed into a single file instead of the minimum cluster size.
Speed depends on the file. Many compressed files actually load faster than uncompressed.

[crokett]

I also think that with a compressed drive it may not be readable under another XP install. In a real pinch it would not be readable under another OS like Linux.

[Rich P]

Disk space today is so cheap why suffer the (perhaps slight) performance hit for compression to save something that has become a bit like streetside tacos south of the border....almost free.

[LCHIEN]

Disk space today is so cheap why suffer the (perhaps slight) performance hit for compression to save something that has become a bit like streetside tacos south of the border....almost free.

because as Phi1l mentioned, some compressed files load faster because today's CPUs are so fast, decompressing a shorter file is faster than loading a bigger file.

[Kristofor]

Look to SSDs for speed (but not under legacy, TRIMless, XP...) and large, cheap, drives for bulk storage.

Using compressed files can help in some cases, but for relatively small uncompressed files a SSD will be MUCH faster than the same files compressed on an "old-fashioned" moving-parts drive . This is a HUGE real-world performance bump far more than most home users are likely to see by upgrading processors, adding RAM (unless they're unreasonably low, etc).

For large collections of data SSD is currently too expensive for (my) home use but the several TB of media I have on WD green drives doesn't gain much at all from being compressed since the video/music/images are mostly compressed already, and even a low power 5400RPM drive provides more throughput than is required by 2 concurrent HD streams.