Disk compression

The notion of disk compression dates from the mid-1980's, when hard drives were very much smaller and, relatively, much more expensive than today. A typical 1990 hard drive would store 80 Megabytes of programs and data, compared to the year 2000 'basic' home user specification of 4.3 Gigabytes (4,300 Megabytes) - an impressive growth of 5,275%. As a result of vastly increased disk storage capacities, users' enthusiasm for such techniques has, not surprisingly, waned somewhat. Overall, it is generally regarded as being cheaper and easier to install another hard drive than deal with the drive/file structures and performance degradation often associated with disk compression. Companies with computer archives dating back to 1995, and earlier, should review these archives to ensure that the files thereon can still be accessed by the systems and software now being used and, if necessary, give consideration to decompressing such disks and storing the information on new, larger capacity, disks.