Hard drive Properties

garm84

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Dec 23, 2008
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Yes im not sure if im at the right place.

Im trying to get some info on the properties. at the bottom where you right click the drive. then click propteries. at the bottom there is 2 things.

Compress drive to save disk space
allow indexing service to index this disk for fast file searching.

i have number 2 checked but number 1 is unchecked. is it a good thing to check both. or leave them unchecked ? I heard if you check the compress hard drive to save disk space slows down the harddrive but im not 100% sure if it's true.

Thanks in advance

Garm
 

satya2002

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Nov 3, 2009
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Checking the Compress drive option is useful only when you are really short of drive space. What it does is, it compresses the contents and you get some more additional space on the drive. Something like zipping up the entire drive contents. but the negative part of this feature is it will affect the system performance. Each time a file is accessed, the file has to be uncompressed on the fly which will be an additional overhead. This shouldnt be enabled on your system drive (where your Operating system is installed). can be used on drives which are not accessed regularly. But not worth it since storage is not expensive anymore.

Now coming to the second option Indexing service, this helps in improving your search results faster. the file changes are are updated in the Indexfile database regularly. So there can be some CPU cycles used for this but shouldnt be a big deal. by default it is turned on. leaving it checked should not create any performance issues.
 

blackhawk1928

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Okay lets clarify.
-I am not going to go into detail explaining to you indexing service but in a short, sweet, concise, and simple terms. "If you don't mind waiting an extra couple minutes on big file searches on your hard drive then UN-tick this box" It will also save considerable system resources.

-About file compression, this compress files (similar to how zip files are used) to save considerable space on your hard drive. However when that file is accessed, your CPU must uncompress it on the fly as its being open which can cause slowdown especially with a weak machine, its not the hard drive thats slow, its the CPU that must uncompress and compress all the time. This shouldn't be a problem as it should only be done if you are very short on hard drive space. And if you are very short on hard drive space then getting a bigger hard drive is a much better option. If you have a very fast CPU then it might be fine but i'd never recommend something like this personally.