What about NTFS compression, what kind of speed loss does it incur?
I would never use it on my main drive, but if it actually does a decent job compressing, and it's still fast enough to watch streaming videos from, then I might consiter it for my slave.
I doubt that you can watch streaming videos from a compressed drive, under any file system. It puts too much load on the proessor to run through the decompression algorithm and the playback codec at the same time.
But remember... The cpu's and drives are so much faster now to handle the decompression and to peel data off the drive itself you can't begin to compare hardware from even two years ago with that of today if your running a fast modern 8mb cache ide drive and a 2000+ XP even as compared to a 386 on a old slow ide drive from the win3 days just isnt even comparable. Also remember the data near the rim of the drive is much faster then farther in or at the end.
So partitioning a section at the front of the drive only for video would help. Keep slower stuff like download files and install ISO's etc... in areas near the end that do not require speed.
But if your running fast modern drives and cpu's you really might try a compressed drive near the rim and actualy TRY some streaming video. With todays hardware its a whole new ballgame and you might be surprised.
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I would never use it on my main drive, but if it actually does a decent job compressing, and it's still fast enough to watch streaming videos from, then I might consiter it for my slave.
So partitioning a section at the front of the drive only for video would help. Keep slower stuff like download files and install ISO's etc... in areas near the end that do not require speed.
But if your running fast modern drives and cpu's you really might try a compressed drive near the rim and actualy TRY some streaming video. With todays hardware its a whole new ballgame and you might be surprised.
Tex