There are two main products on the market that are popularly used for volume
compression in DOS and Windows. The first is DriveSpace (formerly called DoubleSpace),
which is a Microsoft product that comes in various versions and with various
versions of DOS and Windows. The second is Stacker, which is a product of Stac Electronics. I don't plan to get into a
lengthy review of the two products because that is not the purpose of this part of the
site. Both do a good job of providing compressed volumes, and each has some advantages and
disadvantages.
I personally prefer the use of Microsoft's DriveSpace 3 product, for Windows 95, or the
older DriveSpace 2 product for MS-DOS 6.22 (which is what you use if you are running
Windows 3.x). This is not to disparage Stacker; in fact I have read that Stacker is a very
good product and in many ways better than DriveSpace. I just feel more comfortable
with DriveSpace because I have used it more, and because due to the dangers of using compression, I prefer
having the compression software and operating system vendor be the same. I know that I
will always be able to rely on the compression being supported fully by the operating
system since they are made and tested by the same company (well, that's the theory
anyway.)
It should be noted that the older DriveSpace 2 product is limited in its functionality
compared to DriveSpace 3 and the latest version of Stacker. It only supports compressed
volumes up to 512 MB, and that's the compressed volume size. If you want to
compress a 1 GB host drive you have to split it into three or four compressed volumes. It
also offers far fewer options to let you tailor how the compression is managed on the
drive, and suffers from lower performance as well. DriveSpace 3 is a far superior product,
but is supported only for Windows 95.
Note: DriveSpace 3 is not
supported for use on FAT32 disk volumes.
Next: Free Space and the Estimated and Actual Compression Ratios
