When you format a hard disk before installing Windows, you can choose whether to format it in NTFS or FAT32. Today it is less used to format a hard disk because Windows 7 and Windows 8 install automatically without having to do intermediate procedures.
What is important to know is what NTFS means and how it is possible, with a few clicks, to compress the files on the disk so as to take up less space on a hard disk, without slowing down the load or losing quality.
To understand what I'm referring to just open the Computer folder on Windows and right click on the hard disk icon discovering that it is NTFS and that there is an unselected option where it says: " Compress drive to save disk space . "
When you need to enable this disk compression option "> How to compress program and game folders
NTFS compression makes files smaller on the hard disk.
You can access these files normally, without having to put them in zip archives to be decompressed through external software.
As with all file compression systems, however, the computer has to put more effort into the CPU for decompression when opening the file.
However, this does not necessarily mean that it will take longer to open the file.
Modern CPUs are very fast while input / output speeds have not improved as much.
If you take an uncompressed 5MB document, when you open it by clicking on it, the computer transfers the 5 MB from the disk to RAM.
If the same file was compressed and 4 MB large on the disk, the computer would transfer only 4 MB from the disk to RAM.
In this case the CPU should take some time to decompress the file, but this happens very quickly and faster than loading the file (input / output speed).
In a computer with a slow hard disk and a fast CPU, such as a laptop with a high-end CPU, the loading times of the compressed files is the same as that of the uncompressed files.
This is especially true because NTFS compression is not very aggressive in its compression.
It's not like compressing MP3 music or ZIP files, NTFS compression is lossless compression.
All this technical explanation makes it clear that it is convenient to activate the compression of files on an NTFS disk when using a computer with a fast CPU and a slow hard disk .
On a computer with Windows 7 or Windows 8, you can access the system properties from the Control Panel to see the hard disk and CPU performance scores and find out if you have a slow disk or not.
Other reasons for enabling NTFS compression are:
- When files are rarely accessed, the potential slowdown of when accessing them is imperceptible.
- If you have many files in uncompressed format such as Office documents, text files and PDFs.
On the contrary, if there are already compressed files on the disc such as MP3s, videos and films, no space is gained.
- To save space on a small solid state SSD if necessary (compression will result in more writes on the SSD which will degrade faster).
NTFS compression should not be used for:
- Windows system files and other program files.
Using NTFS compression in these areas can decrease computer performance or potentially cause other errors.
This leads us to say that you should never activate NTFS compression for on the disk where Windows is installed .
- On servers where the CPU is constantly being used heavily.
On a modern desktop computer or laptop, the CPU is often in an idle state so it can unzip files quickly.
- On a disc full of compressed format files such as mp3 and avi or divx.
- In computers with slow CPUs, such as laptops with low frequency.
However, if the laptop has a very slow hard drive, compression could help (or spoil) performance.
If you want to activate the compression of NTFS files on a folder, without activating it completely on a disk, right-click on the file, folder or drive you want to compress and select Properties .
Click on the Advanced button where Attributes is written and click on " Compress content to save disk space ".
Then click OK twice and Apply .
If compression of a folder has been enabled, Windows will ask if you want to also compress the subfolders and files.
For example, it may be convenient to activate file compression on the Documents folder, excluding the Music and Video folder.
Compressed files and folders have names written in blue but this can be changed in the folder options. by their blue names in Windows Explorer.
You can always go back to unzip files in the future by clearing the checkbox from the Properties.
In another article it is written how to format hard drives and USB sticks and the difference between NTFS and FAT32
On data compression, there is also a program to decrease the size of all files without losing quality
