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The MagicRAR Drive Press Challenge
simonking:
MagicRAR Drive Press is an NTFS compression based, transparent full-disk compressor. As explained at http://www.magicrar.com/drive-press.html, despite being based on very safe, time-tested, and reliable NTFS compression, MagicRAR Drive Press will squeeze more space out of your computer every single time - typically three times more than Windows itself - as long as you are running Windows Vista, or a newer operating system (including Windows 7, Windows 8, and their server variants). Best of all, because MagicRAR Drive Press is NTFS compression based, you do not need to have it installed to keep accessing your files and data - your drive will work on any computer, with or without MagicRAR Drive Press! Indispensable for SSD users where space costs a premium, MagicRAR Drive Press has been optimized for performance and will even convert your drive in a fraction of the time it normally takes Windows to compress.
Take the MagicRAR Drive Press Challenge! If you can find any third party tool, or can get Windows itself, to match MagicRAR Drive Press's compression, we will give you a free license for the full MagicRAR product when you submit your claim to simon at magicrar.com. And as part of the challenge, we are giving away a fully functional, special edition of MagicRAR Drive Press for absolutely free - for one week only (as of this posting):
http://www.magicrar.com/drivepressdirect.exe - 1.43 MB, direct download, runs immediately without needing pre-installation.
The URL above will remain live for one week only as of this posting, and we trust you will not share the download outside of this forum. This special edition of MagicRAR Drive Press is identical to the full version of MagicRAR Drive Press as found in the full MagicRAR product, with the only difference being that it is completely free!
Find out more about what makes the full MagicRAR product unique at http://www.magicrar.com/features.html. In a nutshell:
- Plug-In Based: Easily extended to support new archive types by installing new plug-ins for them.
- Open Source: Download example plug-ins and their source code at the GitHUB repository for MagicRAR at https://github.com/magicrar. Contribute your own!
- Benchmarking: Cycle through each installed compression algorithm on your own selection of files and folders to find the smallest possible archive with a single right-click in Windows Explorer.
- So Easy, Its Magic: MagicRAR's unique shell namespace extension technology makes all supported archive types browsable in Windows Explorer like ordinary folders - with full support for copy/paste, drag/drop, and double-click to seamlessly extract/compress files.
- Outlook Integration: Directly preview compressed attachments in Outlook with the MagicRAR Outlook preview handler. Automatically compress attachments you are emailing, choosing the archive format and toggling compression on or off with a single click on the ribbon toolbar.
That's just a short list of what's available with MagicRAR, in addition to the wonderful MagicRAR Drive Press utility.
In the words of Scott Swedorski, founder of TUCOWS, and reviewer of MagicRAR: "The software is great. I am very impressed with the level of tools included with it...This is far more than just a RAR creator! What a great tool. I have used WinRAR for years and this blows it out of the water!"
We are confident you will find MagicRAR to be your new archiver of choice. Please enjoy the free edition of MagicRAR Drive Press - and do let us know if you can beat us in the challenge, it will be our pleasure to issue your free license!
- Simon King.
mouser:
Sounds like a fair offer and challenge :up:
flamerz:
could you explain in short the licensing terms?
license per machine, per user, what kind of activation...
thanks in advance for your offering.
simonking:
I'm glad you asked.
Activation is by serial key paired with an email address. Activation is offline, meaning you do not need to have an Internet connection while activating. Licensing is per user.
MagicRAR itself has an inverse 30 day money back guarantee. Meaning, once you order, your credit card is not billed, but you instantly receive a serial key. You have 30 days to cancel your order - if you do so, your card will not be charged. And we trust you will remove the software from your computer and destroy the key should you decide to cancel after ordering.
f0dder:
Right, so I played around with DrivePress.
I'll have to some more testing before posting anything detailed, but my findings so far:
1) DrivePress achieves more compression than "Windows' built-in" compression, sure. But it's not at the level of NTFS compression itself (so nothing magical - DrivePress does indeed, as I proposed, simply uses DeviceIoControlFSCTL_SET_COMPRESSION)), and claiming that "Windows compression, is buggy and fails to compress a majority of your hard disk" is a blatant lie incorrect. More on this below.
2) Runtimes for Windows' default compression can't be compared directly to DrivePress, since it processes far fewer files - DrivePress would come out the loser, anyway. Futhermore, for a standard HDD, increasing the processing threads from 2 (the default) to 4 (the cores I allotted my virtual machine) from ~31 to ~34 minutes, which is to be expected given that a standard Windows installation has a whole bunch of very small files, which results in lots of random I/O... HDDs hate that.
3) I've yet to test with a single thread - that might actually yield better performance than two threads, since there'll be even less random I/O, and since the CPU usage was generally in the 1-digit ballpark, except when processing executables (hello there, Windows Defender).
4) SSDs can probably benefit from running multiple threads, since they're much better at random I/O than HDDs. But as I've already mentioned, NTFS compression on SSDs is A Very Bad Idea (except for applying it to specifically chosen mostly-static files). Filesystem stats after running DrivePress:
134067 files, 132637 compressed (98.9%)
Sizes - compressed: 12234652699, uncompressed: 18137110610 (67.5%)
Total fragments: 665541 (531474 excess frags)
--- End quote ---
Also, because of the way NTFS compression works, even if you do a defrag after compression (defrag and SSD? Ouch again!), you will end up generally suffering more compression than when dealing with uncompressed files (ask yourself how writes into the middle of a compressed file has to be handled - or go read up on how NTFS compression is implemented).
So, "Windows compression, is buggy and fails to compress a majority of your hard disk"?
Not really. Since Vista, security on Windows has been ramped up quite a bit. Lots of stuff has happened, but relevant to this discussion is file permissions. If you go look at the NTFS permissions for core stuff in Program Files, or Windows\System32\DriverStore or Windows\WinSxS you'll see that they have quite restrictive permissions - heck, even the SYSTEM Windows account (the one that normally has the most privileges) only has read-only access to WinSxS, leaving write access to the TrustedInstaller account!
Now, if you're a member of the Administrator group, and go through UAC (which DrivePress does), you can grant yourself access to those files - (which is what DrivePress does - at least it doesn't make those permissions permanent). So nothing magic here, no bugs, just temporary bypassing of Windows' security.
Is it a bad thing to do? Probably not. But it's hardly rocket science.
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