E
Exotic Hadron
Guest
Howdy,
Many of us know there are new compression options available in COMPACT tool on Windows 10. These options are used specifically to compress PE files.
Here they are all together sorted from low to high level of compression:
All the options represent a specific compression algorithm.
The command to compress files is as follows:
compact /exe:lzx /c /f %filepath%
How is the result of using COMPACT with these options different from using NTFS compression?
Some sources say that what COMPACT does is different from what the Compress contents to save disk space option in Windows Explorer does.
Indeed, it looks like the difference is when Compress contents to save disk space enables NTFS compression that uses compression units (CU), COMPACT uses sparse files.
However, NTFS compression does not support compression on file systems where cluster size is greater than 16 Kbytes. If using
C:\WINDOWS\system32>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:
shows you that Bytes Per Cluster is more than 16384 bytes, native NTFS compression won't work and Compress contents to save disk space will be unavailable in file or folder properties.
Here's where you can use COMPACT to compress files and folders on NTFS. Despite what official documentation says about COMPACT
The compact command, the command-line version of the NTFS file system compression feature,
COMPACT is not the command-line version of NTFS file system compression as it uses sparse files.
Since compact arranges data into CUs and makes NTFS to actually read data in CU chunks, it looks like the more compressed data you have, the quicker is random access. It this true?
Could somebody please clarify why won't I always use /exe:lzx on office computers? Say, it looks reasonable to always compress %programfiles%\Microsoft Office\ and %programfiles (x86)%\Microsoft Office by using COMPACT. Indeed there isn't many large files, so compression won't result in many fragments, most of the data is PE files, so using LZX is highly effective and, lastly, there aren't many write operations (or are there?) for the files of Office suite.
To me it looks like compressing office files by using COMPACT will always contribute for quicker start of Office applications and help reduce the space at the same time. Am I wrong? If so, where?
Thank you.
Well this is the world we live in And these are the hands we're given...
More...
Many of us know there are new compression options available in COMPACT tool on Windows 10. These options are used specifically to compress PE files.
Here they are all together sorted from low to high level of compression:
- XPRESS4K
- XPRESS8K
- XPRESS16K
- LZX
All the options represent a specific compression algorithm.
The command to compress files is as follows:
compact /exe:lzx /c /f %filepath%
How is the result of using COMPACT with these options different from using NTFS compression?
Some sources say that what COMPACT does is different from what the Compress contents to save disk space option in Windows Explorer does.
Indeed, it looks like the difference is when Compress contents to save disk space enables NTFS compression that uses compression units (CU), COMPACT uses sparse files.
However, NTFS compression does not support compression on file systems where cluster size is greater than 16 Kbytes. If using
C:\WINDOWS\system32>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:
shows you that Bytes Per Cluster is more than 16384 bytes, native NTFS compression won't work and Compress contents to save disk space will be unavailable in file or folder properties.
Here's where you can use COMPACT to compress files and folders on NTFS. Despite what official documentation says about COMPACT
The compact command, the command-line version of the NTFS file system compression feature,
COMPACT is not the command-line version of NTFS file system compression as it uses sparse files.
Since compact arranges data into CUs and makes NTFS to actually read data in CU chunks, it looks like the more compressed data you have, the quicker is random access. It this true?
Could somebody please clarify why won't I always use /exe:lzx on office computers? Say, it looks reasonable to always compress %programfiles%\Microsoft Office\ and %programfiles (x86)%\Microsoft Office by using COMPACT. Indeed there isn't many large files, so compression won't result in many fragments, most of the data is PE files, so using LZX is highly effective and, lastly, there aren't many write operations (or are there?) for the files of Office suite.
To me it looks like compressing office files by using COMPACT will always contribute for quicker start of Office applications and help reduce the space at the same time. Am I wrong? If so, where?
Thank you.
Well this is the world we live in And these are the hands we're given...
More...