Make data on hard drives smaller?

Yucca

Yucca

Yucca

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Joined
20 Nov 2004
Posts
2,209
Location
Nock/Leicester
Hi all,

Ok i have 1 1TB hard drive and 3 500GB hard drives and there all almost full. I have loads and loads of video files, avi's divx's and even some HD stuff.

All this video stuff is taking up loads of room, understandably. I want to keep it all on my pc, burning it is not an option as i like to have all my media at the touch of a button.

My question is is there any way for me to compress all my videos or make them smaller but retain the quality and still be able to either play them straight off or easily and quickly after uncompressing them?

I know zipping them would be a waste of time as i think im correct in saying that for eg a 25 GB folder would probibly be compressed to 24GB or something.

So any ideas, besides buying some F1 drives! :p
 
2.5 tb of files is a serious amount for a home user

are you starting your own archive or something?


anyways isnt there an option in windows to compress your drives?
 
JBuk said:
2.5 tb of files is a serious amount for a home user

are you starting your own archive or something?


anyways isnt there an option in windows to compress your drives?
Click to expand...

I keep all my files on my pc. I want to have all my media at my finger tips.

There must be another way besides buying more space.
 
Oh and one more question, if i buy another TB Hard drive and want to set it up in a raid 0 with the one that i have thats already full, is there any way to do it without moving all the data?
 
Buy more drives, storage is incredibly cheap now. Drive compression is crap and you can't further compress compressed files (sizes often end up larger...) so your only option would be to spend years re-encoding them all.

As for the RAID question, no.
 
AVI's like Xvid/Divx are already compressed just like MP3's, you would gain little.

I have no idea why any home user needs that much, get Movies/TV EP's burnt to optical media etc.

Compressing a HDD is a boob job IMO, posted about it last week in here (its an old function that should not be in XP or Vista with todays big HDD's also makes AXX'ing the files a tad slower.

You cant set up Raid 0 without losing Data on the Hardrive you want to use as part of the Raid 0 set up.

It is set up at a Hardware level before Windows is even installed. (There is Windows Software Raid though slower).
 
I'm a home user with more than 20TB of disk online which will more than double come the summer. Who wants to mess about with DVD's when you can have everything online and hassle free?
 
AbsenceJam said:
I'm a home user with more than 20TB of disk online which will more than double come the summer. Who wants to mess about with DVD's when you can have everything online and hassle free?
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Home users with fast enough Speed to Upload all that is not a reality yet.

There is no need for any home user to have 20TB, thats a Pron Addict or Warez Monkey IMO.

Burning a Complete TV Series (upto 24EP's to 1 DVD-9 at 10x) is far faster then Uploading it.
 
helmutcheese said:
Home users with fast enough Speed to Upload all that is not a reality yet.

There is no need for any home user to have 20TB, thats a Pron Addict or Warez Monkey IMO.

Burning a Complete TV Series (upto 24EP's to 1 DVD-9 at 10x) is far faster then Uploading it.
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Online storage != stored remotely on the internet.

You've posted before saying that a home user doesn't even need 750GB drives. I couldn't even store a fifth of my CD collection on one of those, let alone on anything smaller. For someone that thinks RAID 0 and Raptors are brilliant because you boot 5 seconds faster you sure like to waste a lot of time reading and writing optical disks.
 
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" Online storage != stored remotely on the internet."

How do you get personal Data onto this in 1st place, Do you upload with your internet connection ?

WTF does Writing stuff to DVD's got to do with HDD size small or large.

I like to have my Movies and TV Series on Disk for keeps for ever.

And get your facts CORRECT, I DID NOT say "that a home user doesn't even need 750GB drives"

What I did say was :

" Why does everyone (esp normal users) need 750GB-1000GB HDD's in their PC's ?.

Do they have lots of Goat.se 1080p Pron ?.

I prefer to have a big HDD externally like the WD My Book I use (ESATA)."
 
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He means online as in available at all times rather than somewhere on the internet.

Having stuff on a local drive means not having to look for the CD/DVD everytime.

What's the difference between a big eSATA disk and a big internal disk? None, it's still a big chunck of directly attached storage.
 
helmutcheese said:
There is no need for any home user to have 20TB, thats a Pron Addict or Warez Monkey IMO.
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Talk about presumptuous. How can you have an opinion on a matter of fact anyway? Could be a home video producer. Do you know much space an uncompressed avi file takes up?


Anyway, buying more space is the only option. h.264 compression could reduce divx/xvid file sizes by about 20% without reducing quality noticeably however it would take forever.
 
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Yucca said:
Hi all,

Ok i have 1 1TB hard drive and 3 500GB hard drives and there all almost full. I have loads and loads of video files, avi's divx's and even some HD stuff.

All this video stuff is taking up loads of room, understandably. I want to keep it all on my pc, burning it is not an option as i like to have all my media at the touch of a button.

My question is is there any way for me to compress all my videos or make them smaller but retain the quality and still be able to either play them straight off or easily and quickly after uncompressing them?

I know zipping them would be a waste of time as i think im correct in saying that for eg a 25 GB folder would probibly be compressed to 24GB or something.

So any ideas, besides buying some F1 drives! :p
Click to expand...

Hi,

I can only think of the following ideas:

Buy 3 x F1s and sell your 500GB drivers
Start burning the things that you don't watch that much
Buy a HD recorder and burn on 25GB disks
 
Energize said:
Talk about presumptuous. How can you have an opinion on a matter of fact anyway? Could be a home video producer. Do you know much space an uncompressed avi file takes up?


Anyway, buying more space is the only option. h.264 compression could reduce divx/xvid file sizes by about 20% without reducing quality noticeably however it would take forever.
Click to expand...

I never pointed any fingers.

It was the same as kiddies on IRC (Winbeta), they said they must have there PC on 24/7.

Fact is no home user (must) have their PC on 24/7, if its earning them cash (legally/above board/paying TAX) its not really home use it would be their job or such.

Actually I do know how much space a RAW Video takes up, but still 20TB is a bit much and I really believe some just have lots of space for the sake of it (not everyone).

And to the one asking whats the difference from having the TB's of Data in the PC or on a My Book externally

The MY Book is a back up for safe keeping, used when needed, running Windows with all that Data thats you possible do not use every day/week and Defragging would be tedious.

Each to their own but I HAVE already answered the OP in post #8, which is more than can be said for the continious Troll in post number #15 who inputed Absolute ZERO to the OP's thread.

I never even questioned the OP's size requirements, it was the other users 20TB that made me wonder.
 
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