Does it make sense to compress my games partition?

[Captain Shiny]

Hello!
Just ran into a full HDD again and now I'm thinking about taking advantage of the NTSF drive compression feature (and before you even ask: NO, I can't afford more disk space at the moment).
So, my games partition has 841 GB in total with 12,4GB free space right now. I just tested it with Divinity 2 and it runs fine - loading times are only a wee bit longer.
I heard that the compression is a bit more CPU intensive but that it's negligible on modern CPUs.
So, would you recommend compressing the whole partition or would that cause problem with a lot of games?

 

[SuB]

Personally I wouldn't bother, it will slow things down and put overheads on everything and I doubt it will make that much of a difference to your drive space either as most assets are in compressed containers that the game itself will auto-extract these days anyway.

If the drive has more than one partition on it then I'd count that double as you'll be doing all kinds of read/writes on it just to get at the data.

Maybe you should uninstall some old games (temporarily of course)

 

[Captain Shiny]

Personally I wouldn't bother, it will slow things down and put overheads on everything and I doubt it will make that much of a difference to your drive space either as most assets are in compressed containers that the game itself will auto-extract these days anyway.

If the drive has more than one partition on it then I'd count that double as you'll be doing all kinds of read/writes on it just to get at the data.

Maybe you should uninstall some old games (temporarily of course)

Yeah, that's what I usually do - just thought I might tweak out a little bit more out of my existing stuff but I guess in this case it doesn't make much sense.

 

[Wraith]

Drive compression was a bad idea back in 1995, I can't see it being any better today not only is it CPU intensive but it eats memory too, and if you have insufficient drive cache it will just crawl to a halt. It's much better to bite the bullet and slam another drive in but if money is tight you can always find a Sky+ box to butcher for an extra 80gb+ drive I usually grab them secondhand for £5ish.