These days, modern filesystem like ZFS has compression and data deduplication (identical data only stored once) support, as well as other useful features such as snapshots and copy-on-write.
Drivespace was what enabled me to play Baldurs Gate 1 back in the day. My specs back then:
- 32MB RAM
- Pentium166 MMX
- 500ish MB drive (My 2GB went bust, so I used an old spare drive for quite a while)
- 16X CDROM
- 2X CD Burner… yarr, that made me a lot of money
- 3dFX Voodoo2 8MB coupled with an ATI Rage Pro
- Soundblaster Live
wooo, look at mr high end over here :-)
640kb RAM 2 x 512 floppies CGA green screen / monochrome
Which came first, DriveSpace or Norton Speed Disk? I thought Norton was first.
Different tools. Speed disk was a disk defragmenter, DriveSpace was whole disk compression. The Norton tool you’d have used a lot if you used DriveSpace was Norton Disk Doctor.
And as I recall, Norton had all the tools long before MS-DOS included them by default. It was sort of a dick move by Microsoft, the sort of thing they’re famous for now.
Raise your hand if you used to sit and watch Norton’s defragger do its thing! 🤩
DOS has always? had chkdsk, but ndd had a knack for being able to recover data from minor corruptions way better than chkdsk did. Scandisk (dos 6 version of chkdsk) was just a prettier face, ndd was still better.
Between ndd, Spinrite, and I can’t remember the name of the undelete tools, I saved a lot of homework assignments.
