brantley@cerritos.edu (05/02/91)
I am interested in hearing from any laptop or notebook users that
are using:
- Stacker;
- Double Disk;
- Squish Plus;
- or any device driver based data compression utility.
These programs claim to increase available disk space using a
device driver to perform data compression.
For example, Squish Plus, in their documentation, states that it
sets up another drive letter via a device driver. Any files in
this new drive are compressed as they enter and de-compressed as
they are extracted. Other application software sees this new
drive just as it would see any other drive.
Do they do the job of increasing disk space?
What performance hits have you experienced?
Any problems with software incompatibility?
I have a NEC UltrLite with a 2 mb silicon hard disk and would
really like to have 4 mb via data compression on the fly.
--
Douglas Brantley, Cerritos College, 11110 E. Alondra Blvd, Norwalk, CA 90650
Voice: 213-860-2451 ext 219, InterNet: BRANTLEY@CERRITOS.EDUdhmst1@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Daniel H Marx) (05/03/91)
In article <1991May1.163537.6024@cerritos.edu> brantley@cerritos.edu writes: > > I am interested in hearing from any laptop or notebook users that > are using: > > - Stacker; > - Double Disk; > - Squish Plus; > - or any device driver based data compression utility. > I have been using Stacker for about a month now and am very happy with it. I am able to store about 35Meg on my 20Meg drive. I have found very few incompatabilities. I used to use PcKwik for my disk caching, spooling and screen review because they can all share the same extended memory on an as needed basis. Unfortunately the PcKwik cache doesn't recognize the new compressed Stacker file because stacker stores in 512 blocks rather than 1024 ones (thus a little text file that is really 200bytes only takes 512 bytes rather than 1024). When I first thought about using Stacker I posted the same question you have. I got one response from someone who said he couldn't use SmartDrive with stacker but I've since heard of others who are. Anyhow, Satcker come with it's own cache that you can use although it can only be configured for conventional memory. Because of on the fly compression, a 40K cache only takes 20 K but even so, stacker takes up about 40K on my machine even without any caching so 640K ram starts getting pretty tight. These are the only problems I've encountered. Becaused a laptop is so dependent on it's hard drive whenever away from home base, I think that Stacker is well worth considering.
rubin@watson.ibm.com (Bill Rubin) (05/03/91)
In <1991May1.163537.6024@cerritos.edu> brantley@cerritos.edu writes: > > I am interested in hearing from any laptop or notebook users that > are using: > > - Stacker; > - Double Disk; > - Squish Plus; > - or any device driver based data compression utility. > > These programs claim to increase available disk space using a > device driver to perform data compression. I just installed STACKER on my Toshiba T2000SX last week. It seems to work just great, and I haven't found any incompatability problems. One minor complaint is that the program won't load itself into high memory without something like QEMM or 386MAX, and running them on the Toshiba tends to blast away the autoresume feature. The program takes 30k, so it makes things a little tight. It definitely did double the size of my disk. I believe my actual compression is closer to 1.9 than 2.0, but I'll live. 80mb sure is nice, compared to 40mb. I believe that Stacker was on sale recently at Egghead for $89. These sort of programs seem ideally suited for laptops! -- Bill rubin@watson.ibm.com