What are the pros and cons of compressing my drives?

Performance. Compression takes time.

Reliability. Compression adds another step to the process when you write something to disk, and that’s one more place things can go wrong.

You don’t gain much. MP3s, GIFs, and JPGs are already compressed, and so you see very little space savings from compressing them again.

Also, there was a brief fad for on-the-fly disk compression in the 1990s, and a lot of people lost a lot of data. Microsoft learned its lesson, and isn’t in a hurry to take that responsibility again.

Hard drives are so cheep. Why compress? That is old school.
Unless archiving large amounts of data.

Pros – More space on the drive, but it is so easy and cheap to buy more storage.

Cons – It slows things down a bit, and the stuff is still all on your drive. If it fails it’s gone. Why not simply move some of it to an external drive or a thumb drive?

When I compressed my drive, my drive failed, and I lost everything. Rather than compress, just buy a larger hard drive. I got an external WD 500Gig MyBook for less than $100. The Terabyte ones aren’t a whole lot more. If you can fill 1064 Gigs, maybe you should think about deleting something. =)

^absolutely spot on.

I thought I needed a terabyte drive. I’ve never needed more than 300GB of it, as I’ve since found out that I’m in the habit of deleting the shit.

If you run out of space, just buy a BIG hard drive – I doubt you’ll fill a terabyte.