Disk Compression, what ever happened to them?????

[burnup]

hey guys, i had been trying to find a good disk compression utility to compress up my iomega zip disks and i can't seem to find any!! i do have drivespace3 but its not reliable at all! i found the "stacker" program but the company don't give out evaluation for it no more! i cannot find that in any place like download.com,softseek.com,or zdnet.com!
you guys know of a good disk compression utility out there and where i can get em????

and oh yeah i'm NOT talking about compression utility like winzip or winrar!

thanks for the time and help!!

[richamies]

what about Zipfolders? This has the advantage that it can be read as normal zip files in a computer without zipfolders installed, and I'm sure there was an evaluation edition somewhere....

[Axel]

Why do you want to compress something you've already got on a zip disk?

What's the underlying goal here?

If it's something really important and you don't have any more storage space, I'd say spend the money on a CD- burner and put it on CD-ROM at 650MB per disk at a cost of about $1 per CD-rom.

[dexmax]

Speaking of storage, investing on a burner is good. I had those extra storage devices, Iomega Zip, Jazz, Syquest SparQ. But the problem w/ them is the cartridges costs is quite expensive and its price is almost the same as IDE HDD's.

Another solution is an Removable HDD. You can get a standard HDD and buy the removable drive casing for about 10 dollars. And you're all set.

I think there's a disk compression utility in Iomega's website. Try it.

But please remember that performance is decreased significantly when the disk is compressed

[Chainsaw]

Between iomega's costly disks and the dreaded "click of death" that struck mine, I sure would go a different route if given a choice.IMO
......CHNsaw

[Ed_S]

burnup, my experience is that there is NO "good" compression util. Drivespace is the best I know of and, like you said, it's not reliable enough.
I tried compressing a Zip right after I got the drive. Didn't really add much space, but it did slow it down even more.

[grandslammer]

Okay, here we go, can you run your drive converter (fat32) on the zip disks? That increases space on hdd by reducing overhead and wasted space in some clusters, so can you usee it on removeable disks?

Hmmm

I don't know, but I KNOW SOMEONE HERE DOES!

Mike P.

[scotter]

you can but it's not gona give you that much more extra room you only see a real diff on drive's that are larger than 1 gig

[BBA]

Ouch Chainsaw....I tried to forget about that 'Click of death' problem...

[bdunn]

if you format your disk with the /z parameter. I dont remember the numbers but it will cut slack space by reducing the cluster size.

[Chainsaw]

Sorry about that BBA,
Actually (knock on wood) mine hasn't quite died yet, it's just very sick (click, ckick).
I only use my 100MB Zip for my Norton Rescue Disk (ironic isn't it).

......CHNsaw

[Nathan]

I wouldn't risk disk compression at all. You can lose everything. Just like compressing hard drives. It can be an accident waiting to happen.

[Todd Beck]

Chainsaw, something about that just seems wrong. Very, very wrong.

[burnup]

oh okay, i had compressed 3 of my zip disk each are like 185mb now but thats not really true! i like copied norton utilities in the disk which is compress with already have files on it. so like when i copied the NU2000 onto the disk it said it was full but it said there on the info window that is had like 10MB still left. i used drivespace 3.

thanks for the help guys

[hai]

One reason most disk-compression utilities are dying is due to the low price of new HD. I bought a 27.3GB maxtor HD from valueamerica for $135 including shipping. People usually don't have that much compressiable data. For those mp3, vcds collectors, disk compression utility can't compress those already compressed data further and help nothing.

You might want to switch to win2000 and use its build-in NTFS file compression. It seems reliable and fast to me. The good thing is that you don't have to compress the whole disk, only those files you want to compress.

[Chainsaw]

Todd,
I assume that you're referring to the use my clicking' 100MB Zip for my Norton Rescue Disk as being very, very wrong?
I strongly agree, I do have the Norton DOS disks with my registry too if it's any consolation, but I'll be getting a CD Burner soon, "I hope". I'm running' without a backup right now. Kinda chancy, but I don't keep any critical data in my comp. It'd be one heck of an inconvenience if the HDD crashes though. All those update, woah!(KOW)