Right clicking over a drive and selecting properties reveals a check box for “compress drive to save space.” What exactly does that do? Does it degrade files?
Probably a stupid question, but worth asking.
Thanks!
No; Windows will only employ lossless compression, meaning no information will be lost. However, with already-compressed data like MP3s and most photographs, there will be little or no reduction in file size.
This - drive compression cannot be lossy, since that would mean that any file stored on it would be corrupted.
I’ll add that compressing already compressed files will generally increase file size (not by much, but still). And it’ll also increase the CPU time it takes to read & write files - which may or may not be significant, depending on the speed of your hard-drive and the how busy your computer is doing other stuff at the same time.
Basically, if you have a separate data disc for videos, music & documents, the amount of space you’ll save to compress it will be tiny to negative, but if you compress your main drive containing mostly programs, it might safe a bit, at the probable cost of slightly longer startup times.
Since any reasonably modern drive, even in laptops, is at least 60 Gb, it’s probably not worth compressing. Typically, once your drive is more than 50% filled, all the compressible data on the drive will be competely dwarfed by the pretty much incompressible audio/video/image files. Unless you’re storing many gigs of html/text files or pure program code it might give you, say, 5 percent more space if you’re lucky. Note that very large installs (like games, or Creative Suite) typically consist of mostly image/audio/video data too.
edit: oh, and compressing a drive might reduce your chances of recovering data should you have a failure of the physical disc. but that depends of the compression used and I don’t know if it’s the case for the built-in windows compression