Because I use my drive array for video editing, and XPps file compression can cause a lag resulting in dropped frames when playing multiple video streams in real time, I had not been using any compression on the drives.

Recently though, Ive started applying XPs compression to selected, non-video, folders, including my main Poser 4 runtime and subfolders.

Q: Can this cause any potential problems that you guys have seen or heard of?

Although the space savings were significant, (my P4 folder shrunk by over a third and my external Textures folder by about a fifth), Ive started noticing brief, unexpected lags when using Poser and am assuming it is a result of the XP compression, but, not sure if perhaps I am just more aware of lags that were already there.

Any thoughts or observations?

where's that pesky EDIT button! small correction: Poser folder, without Textures, actually went from 16.9Gb to 7.8Gb, or a 53% space savings.

IMO file compression is an accident waiting to happen. I remember the horror stories of a few years ago when people would compress files on their HD, only to have it laugh at them when they tried to reload. This may not be the case now but to me, anything that plays with the file structure - and that includes archives such as zip, rar, etc - is to be approached with extreme caution. With mass storage as cheap as it is nowadays I really don't see the necessity. Plus, as you have noted, decompressing a file causes a slight lag.

Ack! Idobelieveinspooks-idobelieveinspooks-idobelieveinspooks... Any more info along the lines "horror stories" with XP anyone?

XP's file compression is much better than in previous versions of windows. I do remember he hell that was windows 95-98 compression and yes it caused a lot of people a lot of grief. As for it corrupting, the simple answer there is back it up. Honestly a little lag inside poser is going to happen whether the files are compressed or not. Hell poser itself is just flat out slow, well P5 is anyway. If you are hurting for harddrive space then compression is the way to go, if HD space is no problem then I would leave it uncompressed.

I have been using XP folder compression on my laptop for over a year and a half, and on my desktop for just over a year. XP compression technology is worlds ahead of previous versions. I started using it on my laptop because the 20GB drive was filling up fast. It worked so well that I now use it on some folders of all my drives. As for the speed hit, at today's processor speeds, and at drive read speeds the delay is very small. When you shrink the files by 53% the processor only has to fetch half as much from the drive. That takes less time, and can take less time than the decompression algorithm takes to decompress the file, so you may get a speed increase in some circumstances. But backup is the key whether you use compression or not. XP Professional has definitely been the most stable OS I have used since OS/2. I have had it running over two years on my desktop, over 2 years on my wife's desktop, and a year and a half on my laptop without a major crash. I did have to restore to previous state once, after installing a spam-fighting program, but that was it. Anyway, I am very comfortable using XP compression

One caveat: never compress the root of a drive. More specifically, never compress the primary partition on a drive at the root -- it can (and will, eventually) corrupt your partition table.

I agree that drives are now cheap. My tower now has ten drives attached, plus a DVD+R writer and a CD burner. You can see by my attached image that I currently have the following drives attached. 100GB, 120GB, 160GB, 100GB, 45GB, 250GB, 60GB, 120GB, 120GB, and a 40GB (all reported smaller because the operating system considers 1GB as 1,073,741,824 bytes, and drive manufacturers consider 1GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes). That is a total of 1.115TB. I am using two Maxtor Ultra ATA/133 PCI cards for a total of twelve possible drives. I have every cable position filled. I needed more storage so I bought four hard drive removable bays. I have two other 80GB drives, one more 120GB drive, one more 160GB drive, and a few smaller ones that I can switch if I need to. So, I thought about another Ultra ATA/133 PCI card, and do have an available slot, but right now I have drives stuffed everywhere in my six bay tower. I cannot find room for more, and can not find a bigger tower. Also, I do not know if three Ultra ATA/133 cards will play together. When you REALLY run out of space you look for solutions. Compression was such a solution. I have many files and folders compressed on the normal partition drives, and have never had a problem yet witht Windows XP Professional. I do backup critical files on DVD, and critical working files on other hard drives. No files or folder are compressed on the Drivecrypt partitions. I am not sure if it would work or help. So there are times compression can help, and it has worked good for me.

I haven't looked for a while, but I couldn't find a bigger tower with more bays a few years ago. I'll have to look around. Thanks for the info.