Compressing AHDD To Make Vital Space
| Field | Data Storage |
| Went Obsolete | 1996 or so |
| Made Obsolete By | Cheap and cavernous hard disks |
| Knowledge Assumed | not much... |
| When useful | When this skill could still be used in the real world |
Back when hard drives were still expensive enough to purchase and difficult enough for the average user to install, and the size of programs was outpacing the storage commonly available in an average home PC, whole-drive compression software such as Stacker, SuperStor?, and DoubleSpace? were seen as ways to extend the mileage of a hard drive.
They worked well in some applications, but had limitations:
- Binary data, such as image files and archives compressed with utilities such as PKZIP didn't compress much more
- Compressing and decompressing data on the fly imposed a performance penalty of its own. That penalty could be substantial if you were using an application that needed to access the disk a lot
- Drive errors such as bad sectors could trash all of the compressed data. Same thing with glitches in the compression process
- Uninstalling the software often required the tedious process of copying files to floppies or some other media before re-formatting the hard drive.
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This is incorrect. Hard drive compression is still very common and has progressed rapidly since 1994.
Sun's latest filesystem, ZFS, does compression and cryptography along with error detection. Crytographic and compressed filesystems and data structures are increasing in usage, not decreasing.
The programs mentioned in this article were toy garbage for PCs?, and yes, those are obsolete now, but hard drive data compression is not.