From: mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539)
Subject: Re: Superstor VS. Stacker...You Make The Call
Organization: Texas Instruments Inc
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 19:14:31 GMT

In <cording.725431393@sorokin> cording@sorokin.anu.edu.au (Dean Cording) writes:

>>In article <1992Dec3.151048.3038@rtsg.mot.com>, planger@mailbox.fwrdc.rtsg.mot.com (Paul Langer) writes:
>>B
>>> My hard drive is rapidly approaching zero free disk space. I would
>>> like to purchase a compression program. So far, I mainly heard about
>>> the two programs Superstor and Stacker. I would like to know which is
>>> the best for the following setup. I have a 125 MEG hard drive. Half of
>>> it is for work/school like Windows, Mathcad, Quicken, Word Perfect, etc.
>>> The other half is for games like Ultima. Should I compress the 'work'
>>> part of the drive and leave the game part alone (i.e. partition) ? I
>>> know many games will not work with the compression programs like Ultima.
>>> 
>>>  Please give me your views and experience with these programs...
>>> 

>I have been using SuperStor v1.3 for twelve months now with no problems,
>except doing an occasional del *.* in my root directory which makes
>it difficult to mount the compressed disk. 

>I was using it to compress two 40 meg drives on my system and I ended up
>with 140-150meg of usable space.  Recently I have installed a 200meg drive
>and it is compressed to give me about 360meg of usable space.  I compressed
>everything including Windows and DOS programs and did not find any
>incompatibilities.  The one exception is that you cannot have a Windows
>permanate swap file on a compress drive.  I created a small 4meg partition
>and placed it there.

>In my opinion SuperStor has a much nicer method of mounting compressed drives
>than Stacker does.  

I'm not sure I see a lot of difference.

>SuperStor's driver opens a file containing the compressed
>drive and intercepts reads and writes on the drive, performing the operations
>on the file instead.  

So SuperStor uses a device driver to write to a file that it treats as
a drive -- presumably this is an 'extra' drive letter, since you still
need some things to not be compressed so that you can boot before the
SuperStor driver gets loaded.

>Stacker goes through a messy business of installing
>a new device driver to read its compressed file as a drive 

In other words, it does just what you describe SuperStor as doing,
except you use different words.

>and then swaps
>the new drive with the C drive which uses up another drive letter. 

You don't have to do this, and I don't.  In fact, I recommend against
it and let the Stacked drive be D: and keep my uncompressed drive as
C:. 

>You can 
>still access the uncompressed drive by going to the D drive.  

So is the difference that you can't access the uncompressed part of
your physical drive if you use SuperStor and you can if you use
Stacker?  This sounds more like a feature than a problem.  Oh, and by
the way, there is a way to set up removable drives (like Bernoullis)
so that they act exactly as you describe -- you 'mount' the Stacked
file as a drive, and you can no longer access the uncompressed part of
the drive.

>SuperStor is
>also alot more transparent in it's operation than Stacker.  

Really?  How so?  And what about the real questions, like speed,
degree of compression, and data integrity?

-- 
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
 in the real world."   -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fred.McCall@dseg.ti.com - I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.