>My personal, and lots of people that I know, experience with Stacker has been
>that it has unexplicebly crashed, loosing all data in the 'stacker partition',
>it has been known to overload voice-coils on some hard disks (I've seen it
>overload a coil on a Seagate), it has corrupted itself, and generally has
>created more problems than it solved.
This is interesting: I have been using Stacker for quite some time now, and have
successfully installed and used on on a wide variety of PC's with no problems wh
atsoever. The only problem I have ever experienced is forgetting to create a swap file for Windows BEFORE creating a Stacker partition.
>Pre-compressed files (.ZIP, .ARC, .ZOO, .etc) will NOT
>be compressed any further by using Stacker, so don't bother if you drive is
>really populated with pre-compressed files, it will just be a lot of time for
>negligable ammounts of space gain.
VERY good point. I have had to talk a number of people at length that use these type of files that another disk drive is the wise purchase, and not Stacker. Stacker is definately not for everyone with disk space problems.
Another point that people may overlook: when using Smartdrive or other on-board disk-caching method, Stacker does not utilize it well, if at all. I believe it has something to do with Stacker intercepting disk interrupts BEFORE the cache has a chance to see them.
Anyway, for all who use it: it works fine, but be careful.
