These days, modern filesystem like ZFS has compression and data deduplication (identical data only stored once) support, as well as other useful features such as snapshots and copy-on-write.
We used a similar program for Windows 3.11, “doublestack” or something. It did work. It did make it a lot slower. We used it on one of the drives.
Drivespace was what enabled me to play Baldurs Gate 1 back in the day. My specs back then:
- 32MB RAM
- Pentium166 MMX
- 500ish MB drive (My 2GB went bust, so I used an old spare drive for quite a while)
- 16X CDROM
- 2X CD Burner… yarr, that made me a lot of money
- 3dFX Voodoo2 8MB coupled with an ATI Rage Pro
- Soundblaster Live
wooo, look at mr high end over here :-)
640kb RAM 2 x 512 floppies CGA green screen / monochrome
That wasn’t my first PC, just the one on which I played BG1 and used drivespace. My 1st PC was more like the generation after yours. 386 of some sort, 2x 3.5" floppies, and a whooping 43MB harddisk.
Sounds similar to my 2nd. 386SX with 20mb hd. 4mb RAM. She was a beast.
I used the proprietary predecessor, Stacker.
It was pretty magical. It turned my 40 MB hard drive into a (seemingly) 80 MB hard drive.
I don’t remember there being a significant performance penalty, because it was presumably overshadowed by the relatively (compared to processor speed) slow disk speeds.
“I don’t remember a performance penalty, because everything was so slow it didn’t matter”
Stacker was the one I used also. It really did work
Stacker, then MS ripped off Stacker and made Doublespace, got sued and changed the compression algorithm and renamed it DriveSpace.
Couldn’t use DoubleSpace or Stacker with Windows 3.X, there was no 32bit driver so disk access was horrendously slow. Windows95 was needed to use DriveSpace with full driver support, but it was still slow and by that time hard drives had caught up with the growing size of the OS and applications somewhat and live disk compression lost popularity, particularly with the way DriveSpace did it. Storing your entire drive as a single giant file backed by FAT32 was a terrible idea and prone to corruption.
When NTFS came around and introduced transparent file compression, that pretty much ended DriveSpace style compression. All modern FS now include some kind of compression, NTFS, APFS, BTRFS, ZFS. Even HFS+ had some ability to compress similar to APFS, but wasn’t very well known.
The idea is still around! Apple’s APFS file system (and HFS+in its later days) support sort-of transparent compression, and on all its platforms most system files - the ones that don’t change much - are compressed to save space for user files. There’s surprisingly little documentation about this.
There’s a third party tool you can use to compress files yourself: https://github.com/RJVB/afsctool
It looks like the technical details are in this pdf: https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/Apple-File-System-Reference.pdf
Btrfs has compression as well. It compressed my root partition to a third of it’s size. It helps out with some games as well, but they usually are not as compressible. The performance impact is pretty minimal as long as you don’t set the compression level excessively high.
But look at that estimation screen! Again, rant all you wish, Microsoft knew how to handle a long running task even back in MS-DOS days. In this case, it’s estimated at 46 minutes. Great!
Meanwhile, today it’s often just “beachball!”. It’s become a bit of a lost art.
This was a double edged sword. For a while I wanted to play with Windows 95, and my hard drive wasn’t large enough. So what I did is I’d run drivespace on dos 6.22 which would double the size of the drive reported and let me install windows 95.
Big problem is that this is prior to journaling filesystems, and Windows 95 was buggy as hell. So windows 95 would crash, it would damage the File Allocation Table, the drivespace file would get corrupted, and you’d have to reinstall windows from scratch all over again.
Really frustrating era of computing, but on the other hand, something like drivespace made the impossible possible even if it was flawed, and many such technologies were coming out that were like that. Video game console emulation in the late 90s was another such thing that was like “What? This shouldn’t be possible…should it?”, as well as stuff like downloading video or audio, or even voice chat over a modem which is sort of insane when you think about it.
So a lot of stuff was frustrating and broken, but also miraculous and impressive. Really interesting time to be in love with computers as a hobby.
Which came first, DriveSpace or Norton Speed Disk? I thought Norton was first.
Different tools. Speed disk was a disk defragmenter, DriveSpace was whole disk compression. The Norton tool you’d have used a lot if you used DriveSpace was Norton Disk Doctor.
And as I recall, Norton had all the tools long before MS-DOS included them by default. It was sort of a dick move by Microsoft, the sort of thing they’re famous for now.
Raise your hand if you used to sit and watch Norton’s defragger do its thing! 🤩
DOS has always? had chkdsk, but ndd had a knack for being able to recover data from minor corruptions way better than chkdsk did. Scandisk (dos 6 version of chkdsk) was just a prettier face, ndd was still better.
Between ndd, Spinrite, and I can’t remember the name of the undelete tools, I saved a lot of homework assignments.
chkdsk in dos never had the ability to scan the disk surface for defects, ndd did that, and then magically scandisk showed up and looked awfully similar to ndd.
But I agree, some really great tools. And sysinfo was our de facto “how fast is this thing?” for years.
Indeed. It really was the end of an era when they went to shit.
Did anyone figure out if scandisk was actually licensed from someone else? I know that lots of the other MS utils were - defrag, undelete etc
Didn’t speed disk do an optimised defragment operation, putting OS files at the start of the drive etc
I believe so yes
