Well, kinda. I've got about 400GB of media, and about 500GB of hard disk space to store it on. I'd like to obviously have more space left over without buying more HDD real-estate.

I've considered things like winrar, but the process is just a little too messy for me, and I believe windows has some kind of auto-archiving tool in it which i've used, but not specifically.

I'd like to be able to play these files on demand, but wouldn't mind a short delay whilst they uncompress - anyone have any suggestions?

i've not heard of any products in perticular that let you do that, have you considered network attached storage? if you find anything really shiney let me know, i'm in a similar position

yarr something i can sink my teeth into, but not right now coz im tired LOL

there are things that you can use to help with compression, have to be careful though as the compression process can affect file integrity, blah blah.

off the top of my head id burn the lot to a bunch of disks, actully lies, i have a TB of space, id just bang in another array of drives LOL

but yeah, ill advise you better in the morn.
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Windows does have built in support for compressed drives however I wouldn't recommend using them.

It will put a big whack on your processor everytime you access the files as it has to decompress them before reading them. Compression is also variable - if you already have compressed audio/visual files then the actual size benefit will be negligible.

You also lose certain compatibility aspects and the ability to recover data easily as it is a non standard filesystem.

Either clearing some stuff off or putting more drives in really is the best solution..

Righto, when i've got the dosh i'll replace a couple of my drives with a couple of 500GB ones. It's amazing, I never thought i'd need more than the 3x250GB drives i've already got

well why u dont backup them all up in dvd or cd, all those drives i cant imagine defrag all drives etc how long it takes
I dont know wot kind of files is it, movies, music, games!!!!
U can use the winRar or the winISO for that and is safe, and both are excelent for music files for exemple

GC

Bloody 'ell that's a lot of porn mate!

It might be worth thinking about an external storage platform if you're really going to use that much data

As far as defrags go, there's not much point in doing them on a drive containing many large files such as films. The benefit is on the likes of a system drive with a large number of small files scattered all over the place.