Fun fact: If you have a really fast system with an ancient hard drive using compression would actually speed up the disk transfer rate insted of slowing down.

I stayed away from double space. If a bad sector occured it would corrupt the double space drive and loss of all data would occur. Not only that but it really slowed down your computer

Related to fitting Win 3.1 on a single 1.44MB floppy, there was a way to squeeze Win 95 into about 5MB of space. It required ripping out a good portion of the OS, but it would mostly work. I've been working on trying to recreate the process from old documentation I've found.

I remember back in the 3.1 days having Double Space running to compress my 386's hard drive for more space. I also had 4mb ram, which wasn't a lot, but instead of adding more ram physically, I got a software TSR that set up virtual memory in DOS that used an additional 8mb hard drive space (on the compressed drive) to emulate EMS memory. Yay, more ram! Which just slowed the poor abused computer down even more.

We had a couple pcs around the house from varying years when win95 came out. I remember my dad and I rushing to put it on all of them only to find some of the older 486 stuff was struggling with space. So we used the earlier version built into the win95 compression tool you mentioned. We had thought it saved the day, but both of those systems became somewhat unstable after a few months. I guess we never knew for sure if the compression was definitively the issue, but we assumed it was and more or less avoided drive compression after.

Nice! I have vague memories of trying DriveSpace as a kid but not liking having the additional drive (which I didn't know back then could be hidden) and the computer being slower. It was a 150MHz Pentium with a 2GB Quantum Bigfoot.

I had a 220Mb hard drive with DriveSpace so I had ~440Mb total. I could copy EVERY floppy disk I owned to the hard drive with room to spare. It felt like walking around in an empty warehouse. I remember thinking "I will never fill this" 😅

I had a 512mb hdd and doubled it's capacity by using DriveSpace it was amazing back in the day.

Nice video, thanks for the memories 😄 The main drawback of DoubleSpace / DriveSpace / Stacker back in the day is that they didnt really play well with games that required either a clean dos boot or loads of conventional memory (e.g. Wing Commander Privateer). So i stayed away from those. Still, of course, plenty of use cases where these were useful. Miss those simpler days...😊 Cheers, and thanks for the vid!

I recall backing up Win95 OSR2 onto 720kb disks using MSBackup on my Dad's PC (AMD K5) and restoring it to my 486 DX33 then performing the install, that took all night to do! the good old days when I first got into IT whilst at school.

I used DriveSpace on MS-DOS 6.22 on my 80286 computer as a child. Looking back, it's surprising that I figured it out with my then-limited English.

Cool thank you for the video. I'd really like to hear the sounds of the FDD and especialy so old HDD.

Very interesting video! I wished I knew about that back in the days. The HDD of my 486 was around 500MB, but we (my family and I) were struggling all the time with just a few free MBs or even KBs... or 0 bytes :P Actually I remember to see the icon of DriveSpace in the start menu, but I was too young (maybe 12) to understand the consequences of doing any of that and I couldn't afford messing up the files.

I used the original Stacker under DOS 5.0 on a 12.5 MHz 286. It worked very well and didn't seem like it slowed anything down. After the next upgrade, I stopped using drive compression and just bought the biggest hard drive I could afford because I heard about some of the corruption that could cause a lot of data loss.

Back in the 90's I ditched Microsoft's consumer OS's and switched to NT4. I enabled folder/drive compression, but noticed it slow the system down and just added a second/third hard drive. There is no such thing as a free lunch (TINSTAFL) as my economics instructor taught me, and these drive compression programs came with a cost. Cool video.

Very interesting video. I never knew about this option. Good work, mate. Thumbs up from me!

On my 386 back then, running MS-DOS 5, I used a very early disk compression software named XtraDrive. It wouldn't increase the size of your existing drive but simply add a second one with the same size, so with a 44MB drive C you'd get an additional 44MB drive D. It did the job, although its compression wasn't the greatest and I sometimes ran into issues where the estimated size was off, so it would run out of physical disk space throwing wild errors. Fun times!

@BitsundBolts I used DriveSpace, but did so on larger, faster drives. I had Pentium CPU's at the time and enabled HiPack. For the old 425MB drive I had at the time, I think it got an extra 180MB of actual usable extra space. After upgrading to a 2GB drive and Pentium2 400mhz, the utility really began to shine. Got a full extra 1GB out of it and never felt any performance differences. Drive Space was a solid utility and I enjoyed using it.

I've used DoubleSpace, DriveSpace and DriveSpace 3 on various PCs a long time ago, but my favorite was Stacker. I think the last version was 4.1. It was more powerful and reliable, which was quite important. DoubleSpace/DriveSpace drives have been dumped quite often. By the way, my first drive was an ST-157A on an Intel 386DX 33MHz, 8MB RAM in late 1993/94.

Man this brings back some memories. Back in the Windows 3.11/95 days I did indeed use DriveSpace, to compress floppy discs and to make virtual partitions on my hard drive. But I never compressed my main drive with it - that just sounded like too much fooling around and with my 2GB hard drive :o I didn't really need to go to such extremes.

The friend of mine had 52Mb HDD back in the days so playing anything was a real pain. But using Drivespace he managed to have Windows 95 and some of the games installed. I had 810 laptop harddrive and that also never was enough. A kind of trauma of the childhood :)

This brings me memories, but not from DoubleSpace or DriveSpace but Stacker. We had Stacker in our 286/8 with CGA/Hercules when HDDs were 10MB, 20MB and 40MB sizes. We didnt run Windows at all, only games. Downside was that disk compression software took base memory and needed to play some games by booting from floppy and played on there.

Ooh yes! I used DriveSpace on my old Pentium with a 1GB Western Digital HDD. Managed to hold Windows 95, Office, Carmageddon, Quake and few smaller games at the same time. Speed did suffer though. Borked it all when started to play with Linux.

I used Doublespace around 1995-96 timeframe on my 486. I think i had a 420mb and a 130mb hdd in the computer and was constantly running out of space. I eventually upgraded to a 1gb hdd though and turned it off, as a lot of my downloads at the time were zip files that wouldn't compress any further, and the slowdown was noticeable enough on a 66-120mhz 486(can't remember exactly when i upgraded from 66 to 100, then 120 and overclocked to 150 all during this time). I didnt even know about problems with sectors then, otherwise i woudlnt have tried it. It wasnt until late 1996 that i picked up a qik-80 drive for backing up.

Finding out about DriveSpace only 26 years after I was needing it :))

Interesting video! I always avoided using compression, as I believed it would ruin performance and I wasn't sure how well the compression software dealt with the uncertainty of the compression rate/actual capacity. From what I've learned over the years, the former may not necessarily be true and even provide benefits in some situations. It would be interesting to see a comparison (e.g., Windows boot time). Your setup with a comparatively outdated slow HDD (even my 386 came with 80 MBs) and a fast CPU may be the best-case scenario for performance improvements. The "uncertain compression rate" situation was solved somewhat more elegantly in NTFS imo. It makes much more sense to me to do this on a per-file basis, but I suppose this would have required a more capable file system. I also wonder, how well these compression solutions dealt with bad sectors...

I vaguely remember using some form of compression with Windows 95 on a 170 MB HDD while waiting to upgrade to a 4 GB drive.

I used to use drivespace back in the day, I oddly remember that progress screen of the pie chart getting bigger quite vividly

My very first computer ran Windows 98 SE. I would often use drivespace to cram more data onto floppy disks. I later found out that the floppy drive could be swapped witb a CD drive, and so I started installing games on it 😁

I used Stacker on MS-DOS back then. Never had any issues with it. Periodic maintenance of running SDEFRAG took all night on the 250MB real partitions we had back then (3 of them across 2 drives), but usually gained a little bit of free space. I do recall one game, Zone 66, having to be installed on an uncompressed partition, though. That game is super-picky about the environment you run it in. Can't remember what I did on Win98, but I think I may have had to forgo compression due to it not being supported on FAT32. Definitely used it on XP and 7 on NTFS drives, though. Took until the multi-terabyte era before I stopped using it.

I remember my first PC (a Hyundai Super AT 286 my dad got from his work I think) which had a 20MB harddisk with few bad sectors. My uncle came by and installed Stacker and in the end I got lik 30 or 35 MB of disk space. Downside was that it got much slower than before 😅

Nice, I still have a Miniscribe 8051A with 41MB so I guess this might be a project if I ever get really bored.

Our original IBM PS2 486 shipped with double space activated by default. I think it was only a 160MB drive, but it showed around 220MB. Years later I installed Windows 95 on it so I could network it with my other computer to experiment with an Internet proxy.

Oh boy. This takes me back to the time when I had 20MB. 😂 I had to decide between a GUI or DOS/Doom. I got very good using CLIs...

Bits und Bolts, you have a very good video capture showing real hardware. Is it possible for you to upload the full boot process of Windows 95 (A) so that it can be studied further? Emulators doesn't show things correctly. You kinda cut out the boot process from this video, but showed the logos for a few seconds (when were amazing quality)

This question bugged me ever since I had 386 with 40MB HDD. Never attempted installation because it was pointless on 386SX but it is interesting to see it was indeed possible.

I used DblSpace / DrvSpace on my 486 system. It had an overclocked 486-DX2 at 80MHz, 12 megs of RAM (4MB-72pin + 4MB-72pin + 4x 1MB-30pin) and a 100MB Seagate HDD. Different times, when disk was the loudest part of the computer, and anything electronic / computer related was very expensive. Lost my data once, when the virtual disk got corrupted, and only got partial recovery (learned about making backups then). Had a (pirated) first version of Win95, very bare-bones, with no jpeg support, etc. Once I bought and installed a CD-ROM I could remove the (pirated) Win95 installer files from the disk, and it left me soooooo much space. Even had some mp3s on the machine, just CPU was too weak to play them at full quality (had to choose: either 22050 stereo or 44100 mono). Also had Paint Shop Pro 5 (a `bootleg' copy from a friend with a CD burner), which allowed me to open Amiga IFF images on a PC. After getting a "real computer" in 2001 I stopped using disk compression, until lately on btrfs.

I used it once on my first PC way back in 90s on windows95 to install more games :) and then in w98 did the same upgrade to newer version :)

Oooh, DriveSpace, when I was little we were poor, I had a pentium MMX when everyone was running around with P3s and such (around 2001) and only had a 500 MB hard drive, this was still available in Win98 and I spent couple hours using it to get around 200 MBs more space - was the only way to install Quake 2 - but DriveSpace used to crap out a lot and I had to wipe the drive and reinstall Win98 then compress again until a year later I got a 10 GB Seagate drive. Good times.

I realize this was an academic exercise but I worked in a computer store during this time and I can't even tell you how many systems I worked on where software drive compression went awry. The billable hours were great though and I sold a ton of new hard drives.

I remember back in the day messing with Memmaker and someone screwing up the computer lol. Later on I did use Drivespace, I think I used it on some ZIP disks oddly enough. I have no idea how memmaker worked through.

I've used ntfs's builtin compression to eek out a few more gigabytes out of a Vista install on a 32GB sdcard. The Qualcomm BREW toolchain eats up a fair bit of storage.

There were times when I had 32mb ram and 120mb hdd. I had a configuration option with 24 mb ramdrive compressed with drivespace, so I could install a game on it (doom 2, duke nukem 3d, homm), play and copy saved games to hdd afterwards.

i used drivespace back in the day to store games it almost doubled the disk space. I had two 500mb drives i used one for the operating system and the second for games. if you compressed the c drive it was really slow so i only used it for the data which worked fine.

5:35 IIRC there is a "Floppy Office" that have a full "office" suit in a floppy disk.

Speaking of fitting things in weird spaces, I just remembered years ago I managed to fit Win 3.11 (including MSDOS) in just two 1.44MB floppies and boot from there. I had to strip out as many files as possible whilst windows did not complain about missing files. Other than that, just had to have A: and B: in the PATH.

And then we circle around to todays filesystems, NTFS has compression available, For example ZFS has compression and deduplication available, and unless you have literally many NVMe's in parallel you only gain data speeds in most of them.

My pc had DR DOS instead of ms dos but it had a similar compression utility. I don't remember the name but I was very happy that I could fit a few more games on that small 40 mb HD

My 120 mb HDD was so slow, that using drivespace made it actually faster even with hipack option on 486.

I tried it. I hated it, but I couldn't avoid it. It made my computer noticably slower. I'd buy a new drive, turn it off, fill the new drive up, turn it back on. Eventually I finally got ahead and no longer needed it anymore. Eventually I ran into issues with my 256gb SSD (SATA 3 for $800) in my 2011 build. I upgraded to 512gb (also for $800) and it lasted a long longer. Eventually I doubled it up with another 512gb ($400). And just around the time I was running out of space I built my 2021 build. It has 4tb of NVME. I've exceeded the 1tb mark, but only just.

Run the compression agent and there you can choose *UltraPack* which compress more than HiPack and will make the computer really slow if the CPU is a 386 or slow 486 but I've no idea how it works on a P200...

This is amazing, does it come with much of a hit to performance tho?

I didn't use it at the time as it was a bit unreliable for me... But today, I am a big user of file system compression. After a swap to Linux and running ZFS, the amount of compression and speed you can achieve with lz4 and zstd is a bit insane. But the biggest reason to use compression today isn't just for the benefits of extra space, it actually benefits loading times as you move less data over the slow interface to the storage medium and get a lot of data once the CPU is done decompressing it. With modern CPUs the penalty for decompressing is very minor compared to how it would be back in the DriveSpace 2 days.

I remember i had this same version of Windows, 13 disks and had to update from W3.1

I tried this back in the day and the speed cost was immense. I had more space, yes, but the whole computer felt like it was underwater. It took ages to actually work with any files. Especially if you happened to have compressed files on the drive already. Extracting zip files became several times slower.

I can remember going to buy my first PC back in Windows 95 days and the salesman told me that this PC has been upgraded to an 8gb hard drive, and because I knew nothing about PC's back then, I said what does that mean? and he said basically you could never fill it in a lifetime.

In 1995 I did play with drvspace. But I didn't need it because I had a 105 MB drive.

I think the reason it told you that there was only about 1 megabyte left was temp files windows created during install. Once the install was done it deleted the temp files. Giving you the 13 megabytes of free space. I know NT would do this as well.

my first PC had a 40MB HDD and it was a pain: with Windows on it I could only install Word and some basic app and the disk was full. If I wanted to install a game, I had to uninstall Word :) I remember testing Stacker back then and jump on my seat when it showed me an 80MB drive :) But I also remember that the 2:0 promise was short lived as the more I used the drive, the less efficient the algorithm was so I went back to an uncompressed drive. When I broke the bank and bought a 100MB drive I thought I would never have space issues anymore. Sure. :)

I wonder if the sizes listed in the WIndows 95 install are assuming a worst case 32kB cluster size rather than the actual cluster size on the disk itself. Could explain why it ended up much less than the install said it would.

Reason it says more for install, is because of temporary files required for installation. Have to remember most the files are compressed, and have to be expanded, then copied over.

I wonder why the Windows 95 installer got its estimate for the install size so wrong the first time round? seems quite strange! I have no experience of using Drivespace with Windows 95, a 500MB hard drive was part of the various upgrades (mainly doubling the RAM at great expense!) to my 486 at that time to dual boot Windows 95 and NT 4.0. Of course this wasn't enough, like most things in the 90s where every year you seemed forced into upgrading something! Would be interesting to see just what performance impact this has on your machine

my pc right now has 2000x more storage but it wont let me install windows 11 times never change. the numbers go up but i always have the same issues .i am sure i will have the same issue with my new pc when windows 12 comes out and it requires a 10 terabyte ssd or something .

i legit had that HDD in my 386 and 486...

LMAO I recall stumbling onto this executable at 12 years old after I upgraded my DOS 5 to 6.2 - yeah, I was so excited, no more floppy swapping.... Except the already dogshit slow 386SX 20 was even slower running anything at all. I made it a use-case for my dad to upgrade to a 120 Mb hard disk (from a 42 Mb) Hell no!

I used drive space back in the day with 95. It was slow as heck and one day poof it curruptes - lost everything

More windows 95 please. I wasn’t aware that win 95 runs under 6.22 What versions of windows run only under dos 7?

I used it on a 386 with a 40 mb HD, the extra space was nice but it was so slow I regretted doing it When I got a 500 MB HD it was totally unnecessary.

I’ve used it, but it was sooooo slow… but I was probably on a 486, not Pentium 200…

Did you end up trying the Hi-pack option?

I dont like it cause it is too slow, but my friend did use it on his 850mb hdd to win some space for games

Now do stacker and compare the results.

Meanwhile my Pentium MMX laptop got a 100gb hdd.

You get a 20+% performance drop from running dblspace and realistic compression of 1.4%, but still, back in the day, it was the sh*1. In the end, this feature sucked 🤣

Lol You're insane! I remember people installing things using a million diskettes.. Microsoft Office, I think.. Even then, it felt like total insanity. I have faded memories of this... But I knew about someone doing this, *and CDs were already available* at the time! You know? 600MB CDs!!! Lmao

Sir you have some bad sectors on your hard disk.

UwU)/

windows 95 is very bloated for 1995 lol