1

I have a laptop with the following NVMe SSD drive:

NVMe KXG50ZNV512G NVM

as proven with Speccy Free (sorry for UHD)

Speccy SSD NVMe

I have a quite powerful CPU too:

Intel Core i7 7700HQ

My question is:

Since having a limited SSD space, and I will be copying millions of very little files on the drive, would NTFS compression be of help, that's for sure, but for what price?

I mean how much performance decrease?


EDIT1:

The typical files sizes range from 50kB to 1MB. And are text files, i.e. very well compressible.

Vlastimil Burián
  • 3,887
  • 11
  • 41
  • 65

1 Answers1

3

Depending on your use case you might not notice any difference in performance at all.

The best case is that you save space and gain some performance. The worst case is that you loose some performance.

Tom's Hardware has done some benchmarking previously and it actually suggests that, at least in 2011, on SSDs NTFS compression can still result in a net gain in MB/s from the drive or at least a net gain of close to zero. This implies that for SATA connected SSDs the interface is still the bottleneck rather than the CPU and implies that the NTFS compressor is actually very fast, at least for single threaded tasks. You can ignore their earlier CrystalDiskMark tests as they are irrelevant.

If you are doing a lot of file copying from one compressed location to another then performance may drop (content below is quoted from Tom's Hardware benchmark pages linked above)

copy operations are theoretically going to be slower, since the file system decompresses the corresponding files first, copies or moves them, and then compresses them again

So you don't want to be doing a lot of read-write operations as it could tie up your CPU which would be especially bad if you are already using the CPU for other things.

The easiest way to find out if this is beneficial for your use case is to try it. Enabling and disabling NTFS compression is trivial and can be done in-place. If whatever you are doing on these files goes significantly slower then disable it, if it goes slightly slower but is offset by having more space then that would be a win. If it goes faster and you have more space then win-win.

Related reading

Mokubai
  • 89,133
  • 25
  • 207
  • 233