CompuServe Messages

Rojer — There are two kinds of "data compression" software: realtime and not. Based on your subj. heading, it sounds like you're looking at realtime compression, such as stacker, or somthing like it. I think you'll find that depending upon what application (and thus what version of .TGA) you'll only achieve a 10% compression at best. For the most part, I don't think you should plan on any savings if you're only interest is storing compressed TARGA files… The purpose of "compressed" TARGA and GIF is to give you the "realtime" compression buit-in to the file format, rather than external (on the disk). Non-Realtime compression utilities such as PKZIP, LHArc, etc… Offer a much higher compression ratio at a cost — speed. They don't run "realtime", but if you can live with that, you can expect better compression. Still, though, you can't expect more than say 30%, again, depending upon the version of TARGA (and the version of the archiver, they're constantly surpassing each other in performance and compression ratios)… Now, if you're looking to put "uncompressed" files on a stacker, or disk doubler drive… I recommend it highly. I'm personally running stacker on 2/3 of a 200MB disk. I have a "partition" (quotes intended) left "unstacked" for Windows SWAP, temp files, and yes, .ZIPs, .TGAs, and .GIFs… I have over 400MB of files on this 200MB drive, and I still have over 100MB reported free ! I don't suffer from any noticeable performance loss, and swear by the reliability. Hope this helps — — Matt