Friend of mine hit me up with a question about freeing up his C: drive space by enabling compression of his C: drive using checkbox under the general tab on Windows 7.

I told him that he would take a performance hit if he used this, and he asked how bad it would be, and I said that you would have to check the BOX and let it compress and see if you could live with it, but I will check first on this forum before he gives it a TRY.

Question I have is before he goes ahead and tries this out are there any drawbacks other than a performance hit in which the system has to constantly compress and decompress data? Is this feature not as bad as it was years ago because modern hardware is much QUICKER? Does the system also compress swap space or is that left alone as for that seems like it should be left alone from any compression to be as raw as possible to pass back to system RAM, although maybe page/swap info is as compressed as it could be anyways as for its just binary read/writes?

I haven't messed with C: drive compression in YEARS. I used it a long time ago on Windows 95 with Microsoft Plus! for Win 95 when I had a 486 DX 33Mhz 16MB RAM with a small 320MB Connor IDE HDD and 2x Sony CD-ROM and it worked to allow me to fit more stuff on a system with limited space, but there was a noticeable performance hit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpaceThe compression feature is part of the NTFS file system.

Herei s a SuperUser article/post on NTFS compression performance considerations.Thanks for the link... shared it with him. Looks like he is going to try it out and see if he can live with any performance hit.