Are there any benifit of compressing C Drive?

[Porama6400]

WIndows give option to compress entire drive, is it actually good to compress it? Or it will cause huge latency problem?

[Guest]

Probably not, as the cpu needs to do work to uncompress all the files you want to access, causing latency.

 

I would only compress the archival drive, and even then out of a 1TB drive the compression only saved about 50gb or so of space in my case, not worth the hassle.

[Psittac]

Don't compress the C drive, I did that when I was a kid on our ibm aptiva and the thing never worked right after that.

 

It's far better to add a drive or upgrade a drive than compress.  I'd think compressing is only for archiving

[Godlygamer23]

I'd only do it if space is that much of a concern to you.

[mariushm]

You can compress individual folders.  Simply compress Program Files and less important folders from the Windows installation, like everything but those big folders with lots of DLL files in them (system32 , syswow64, whatever they're called in windows 10).

 

At least on Windows 7, there's a MIcrosoft.NET folder and assembly folder which holds various .Net runtimes which are accessed only when you start a .net application and then basically the files are cached in RAM, so you can safely compress that for some savings.

There's an Installer folder which holds the uninstallers for various programs you install and backups of all windows updates... often that's hundreds of MB if not GB in size after several applications are installed - that one I often just move to another drive and create a junction to it with SysInternals Suite junction.exe

 

Some applications like Mozilla Thunderbird or Firefox default to storing their data on C: drive, I also move those folders to another drive and create junctions ( invisible redirects) to the new locations.