I am using Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon.

Windows XP used to have the option of compressing the hard drive, and thus effectively make it larger without any further expense or hassle.

Does Linux Mint have the same option, or is it already enabled as the default? Or is hard drive compression not supported in Linux?

Thanks

SSD drive or Platter drive? I don't think you would want to do disk indexing on a SSD drive.


Besides. Linux file structure is different than a windows registry I would think.
On my boxes. My Linux systems search through their file systems a lot faster than Windows does.
Just speaking from personal experience though.

Maybe I am not understanding the question here, though. Make the drive bigger?

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/using-l...e-compression/

you cannot compress the hard drive itself (you would need a road roller to do that), but you can use a compressed filesystem. That means the files will be compressed "on the fly" and only the compressed data will be stored on the filesystem, instead of the real file. Actually there are several solutions for that on linux, but the default filesystem(s) used by Mint are not compressed. To make a partition compressed you need to remove the existing filesystem and put a new one which supports compression, this is not an easy job. You may say it is a conversion, but I would rather say, it looks like a conversion:
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online...th-Fstransform
http://superuser.com/questions/88468...ystem-on-linux
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E37670_01...se7_btrfs.html

Actually I suggest you save all your important data before trying it...

Here are a couple of articles I found by Googling 'using compressed filesystem' - there are more.

https://lwn.net/Articles/219827/

https://www.linux.com/news/save-disk...ss-filesystems

Perhaps I'm just overly cautious but I'm not sure I'd trust a compressed file system. With a non-compressed one a bad sector only affects the file stored on it (well, unless it's in the FAT etc.) whereas one bit in a compressed system could mean lots of data loss. Add to that the CPU overhead and it doesn't look like a good option to me.

So the conclusion is, that disk compression is not supported in Linux, at least not in any user-friendly way yet.

Thanks.

I think it's more that disk compression is unlikely to be supported for general use on any modern OS. XP used it because hard drives were a few hundred megabytes so it was, arguably, worth the hassle.