Drive Space - Reception and Incompatibilities

Reception and Incompatibilities

Initially, DoubleSpace was surrounded by an air of mystery. Many had difficulties understanding how it was possible to store more data on the disk than what was stated by the disc manufacturer. This led to much speculation, with some users thinking DoubleSpace changed the way data was stored physically on the disk, and there were rumors that using DoubleSpace would reduce the longevity of the disks or the computer itself. This was a misunderstanding: DoubleSpace used purely logical/software means to obtain its results and from a compression point-of-view was not different from other compression tools like PKZIP. DoubleSpace is, however, different from such programs in other aspects. For instance, it compresses whole discs rather than select files. Furthermore, it hooks into the file routines in the operating system so that it can handle the compression/decompression (which operates on a per-cluster basis) transparently to the user and to programs running on the system.

A few computer programs, particularly games, were incompatible with DoubleSpace because they effectively bypassed the DoubleSpace driver. DoubleSpace also consumed a significant amount of conventional memory, making it difficult to run memory-intensive programs.