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MagicRAR Drive Press - worth anything?

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f0dder:
I've browsed through the site - it's very fluffy, full of marketing hyperbole but low on actual information. Again, extremely typical of snake-oil crap. Made me feel like hitting somebody with a baseball bat, guess I should have another cup of morning coffee ;)

Most of their claims sound like complete crap to me. My guess (just a gut feeling, not verified) is that their drive compression boasting is something along the lines of... when selecting "Compress this drive to save disk space", Windows doesn't select every file and folder by default (I'd guess it skips %WinDir% and other locations), whereas MagicRAR probably goes gung-ho on the entire partition. How im-pres-si-ve. And using a term like "SSD optimized" for simply calling the built-in NTFS compression routines from multiple threads? *facepalm*.

I'd stay very, very, very clean of this piece of software and the people behind it.

Stoic Joker:
Just thinking out loud here...
This is the amount of free space available on a brand-new Windows 8 Professional computer.
 Windows will compress this drive when you check the "Compress this drive" box.
--- End quote ---

The default Windows compression is date based, so that currently new and frequently used files don't incur any (compression/decompression) overhead. This of easily seen in the drive cleanup utility where the checkbox to enable says "compress old files to save disk space". That and wandering through the file system in detail view will show that only the files with older dates are blue (signifying they are compressed).

As an example (because the same dates are being used), if anyone has used a defrag utility that arranges the files based on frequency of access. When you run it on a fresh install with a 30 day window ... Everything on the machine is marked as new.

So if they're using a brand new freshly installed computer...it's not going to have a lot of old files making their demonstration (complete BS) a bit of a loaded dice game.

Renegade:
System software just scares me... If it conks out, god only knows what can happen. I prefer to rely on the basics and some very well trusted tools that have been vetted over and over again. e.g. SysInternals.

vlastimil:
Agree with f0dder. The software probably does nothing else than force the compression flag on all files, even on those, where it would make no sense (fixing this "bug"). mwb1100, you mentioned, you want to compress specific files - just go ahead and enable NTFS compression for them (or for the folder they are in) - you don't need that software to do that for you.

The NTFS compression is rather conservative and sometimes it really does not make sense to enable it. It has different priorities than zip or rar. The compressed files must be easily and quickly modifiable and provide random access. The files are divided into compression units of 16 clusters (1 cluster is typically 4kB) and compression occurs only if it would reduce the size of the unit by at least the size of 1 cluster. For some files, it never happens and attempting the compression only wastes time. For small files that fit into a single cluster, the compression may also bring no benefit.

f0dder:
System software just scares me... If it conks out, god only knows what can happen. I prefer to rely on the basics and some very well trusted tools that have been vetted over and over again. e.g. SysInternals. -Renegade (December 10, 2012, 09:43 AM)
--- End quote ---
I wouldn't label MagicRAR as "system software" - from their marketing fluff, I'd conclude that the developers aren't too skilled, and are simply using the built-in NTFS compression (calling DeviceIoControl with FSCTL_SET_COMPRESSION). That's the same thing that happens if you enable compression on the file properties dialog box.

It's also not a super smart thing to do on a whole volume, it can add a fair amount of file fragmentation especially on files that are often modified... and I definitely wouldn't do it on an SSD (even if the space savings might seem juicy on those small drives) - both because it can end up causing a lot more disk writes than uncompressed access, but also because some SSD controllers do their own compression (SandForce, for instance).

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