this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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Stacker, then MS ripped off Stacker and made Doublespace, got sued and changed the compression algorithm and renamed it DriveSpace.
Couldn’t use DoubleSpace or Stacker with Windows 3.X, there was no 32bit driver so disk access was horrendously slow. Windows95 was needed to use DriveSpace with full driver support, but it was still slow and by that time hard drives had caught up with the growing size of the OS and applications somewhat and live disk compression lost popularity, particularly with the way DriveSpace did it. Storing your entire drive as a single giant file backed by FAT32 was a terrible idea and prone to corruption.
When NTFS came around and introduced transparent file compression, that pretty much ended DriveSpace style compression. All modern FS now include some kind of compression, NTFS, APFS, BTRFS, ZFS. Even HFS+ had some ability to compress similar to APFS, but wasn’t very well known.