anybody who sees this today should be aware that, in the case of video games, yes even regularly patched ones, enabling compression on the drive or folder can decrease load times, even on slower cpus of today, and even on ssd's (other then the fastest ones most people dont have), you need to defrag regularly though, and i strongly recommend buying perfect disk, once you use its "Smart agressive" defrag, AFTER compression, leave its auto prevention of frangmentation feature enabled, it will keep an eye on activity and auto-optimize to avoid fragmentation, at very little to no perf hit(testd this all the way back to old first gen quads of both amd and intel on modern windows recently infact)
many game files compress insanely well, some games have files that take up disk space, despite being mostly blank...one game i compressed a while back went from 6gb in one of its folders to under 16mb..... (wish i was kidding...talk about wasted space and wasted I/O....)
compressed a buddies steam folder a while back, took it 4 days to compress(its on a 4tb drive and it started 3/4 full), when it was done....he was using around 1/3 of the drive total, defrag took another day(but, it started out horribly fragmented because, he had never done a defrag on it, ever..despite multi mmo's on it...and shitloads of steam/uplay/origin/etc games on it...)
DO NOT compress you pictures/images folders, it wont do any good, and will just make accessing them slower on slow systems(wont even notice on a 1/2 decent rig though...)
i have compressed my drives on every system since nt4, BUT, selectively, i will actually decompress folders where compression does more harm then good, its the "best practices" we came up with way back in the day as gamers, geeks, "it"guys(before that was a term), and, its stayed true, honestly, i wish they had a more fine tuned way to compress drives/data, there use to be a tool that wasnt free but affordable, that got you much better compression results without compressing any data that shouldnt be compressed....
anyway, even many older dual core systems actually benefit overall if you
1. run ccleaner
2. run chkdsk /f from elevated command prompt (type y then restart and let it run the check)
3. compress the drive.
4. defrag with either mydefrag or better, perfect disk, this will take time..
5. fine any folders containing large files or pictures/other content that dosnt compress well/at all, decompress the folder or just the files, my exp here is, you rarely have to defrag after this part of the process but, its best to check.
i get why some people are against compression, but, having tested it, when used properly, ssd or hdd, and especially slow old hdd's and ssd's, compression when used properly can seriously help not only save space but, performance, even most older dual cores can deal with the average compress/decompress cycles faster then the drive in those systems can move, having tested this, first gen and cheaper older design ssd's, can benefit from compression, not as much as slower hdd's in most cases but, a buddy has a netbook thats got a VERY slow, hard to replace ssd in it, as well as a much easier to replace easy to access ssd slot, but, the stupid thing CANNOT boot from the added ssd without removing the other one physically... (horrible bios, but...for what the unit is, its actually nice, more powerful then it looks..outside the slow ssd thats installed in such a way you have to take the whole thing apart to get to it......), compressing that drive and just having windows and the most basic of apps(like office) on the slow ssd actually sped it up, even in read/write, because its cpu actually ends up waiting for the damn ssd..it dosnt for the faster one he insalled...i suggested just putting the boot loader on the internal ssd and the os on the added but..hes hoping to eventually kill the stupid thing by using most of it for the page file....(its 128gb but, ungodly slow, like i have usb3 flash drives that have better write speads....that cost all on sale at newegg/amazon......)
i STRONGLY suggest compressing at least your games drive/folder...my god the dif that can make on even fast systems!!!