Windows disk compression?

So, anyone use it?

I thinking of enabling it on my servers shared DATA drive, that has my videos, documents, music, downloaded programs, backup ISO's etc on it.

Would like some advice if I should turn it on or not? Im not short on space (for now) but it could hold off a future drive upgrade for a while.

Also, what about my backup disk? My backup program uses compression to backup my DATA drive so I guess I should not enable it on this drive? Thanks

(Server specs in sig)

I used it back in the Windows 95 days. Basicaly its a performance tradeoff. Enabling compression will free up space at the cost of speed. Everytime data is read or written it must first be (de)compressed.

Hard drives are super cheap I would say just buy another drive if you need more space.

Your backup program probably just stores the data as compressed files. Enabling compression on that could have some incompatability which you would risk, but the larger reason for not doing it is that the data is already compressed so compressing it again isn't likely to gain any (significant) amount of space and would only slow everything down.

It depends on what type of files we are talking about. Most backups and media files are going to be compressed to some degree and will benefit very little from outside compression. If you are talking about text files/databases, then yes, it would help a substantial amount.

With that being said, I see no reason to use compression with the availability of cheap mass storage devices and low compression rates.