SwellDisk 300%: Does It Work?

[Darius Wey]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.swelldisk.com/' target='_blank'>http://www.swelldisk.com/</a><br /><br /></div><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/wey-20050520-SwellDisk.gif" /><br /><br />SwellDisk 300% claims to enlarge the size of your storage card by 300%, and with support for Microdrives, it could work out to be a neat solution for those of you who are tight on storage space. Actually, I've never been a huge fan of software-based solutions which claim to boost this and that, since I have always believed that the easiest way to get additional performance is to buy the hardware which can provide it (and in this case, it would be a bigger memory card). However, that's not to say that SwellDisk 300% doesn't work. If it really does what it says, it could work out to be a cheaper and quicker solution. The downside to all this is that no trial version has been made available, but if that doesn't bother you, <a href="http://www.handango.com/ampp/store/PlatformProductDetail.jsp?siteId=311&productId=165311&productType=2">Handango</a> has SwellDisk 300% on offer for $39.99. Note that the standard version is also <a href="http://www.handango.com/ampp/store/PlatformProductDetail.jsp?siteId=311&productId=162170&productType=2">available for $19.99</a>. If you're a SwellDisk owner and believe it to be worth every buck, be sure to let us know. [Affiliate]

[markan]

It reminds me of the days when some of us used Stacker on hard drives. It sounds great, but the compression is unlikely to reach the 300% their name implies. My SD card is full of JPEGs and Ogg Vorbis audio, and I bet they can't shrink that by much... :?

[Ward]

Scam.

In the UK, the advert will fall afoul of the Trade Descriptions Act. Disk compression is nothing new. Most PC's do not use such compression on volumes storing programs (As I hope most people use their CF/SD cards to store programs as well as documents) because it increases the CPU and RAM overhead to read, decompress and store program segments.

In reality - you save maybe 10% of your CF card space in exchange for reduced speed and extra RAM usage.

[Skoobouy]

"Natural Harddrive Enhancement!" :lol:

[farnold]

but if that doesn't bother you, Handango (http://www.handango.com/ampp/store/PlatformProductDetail.jsp?siteId=311&productId=165311&productType=2) has SwellDisk 300% on offer for $39.99. Note that the standard version is also available for $19.99 (http://www.handango.com/ampp/store/PlatformProductDetail.jsp?siteId=311&productId=162170&productType=2). If you're a SwellDisk owner and believe it to be worth every buck, be sure to let us know. [Affiliate]
Yeah, right, and the real swelling happens on the sellers accounts - for the same money you get a nice SD card and less trouble...

[carphead]

I like the fact that the support email address is [email protected]. Straight to the top man! :D

[Darius Wey]

...you get a nice SD card

Well, that was precisely my point. I did say in my earlier post that if I had my way, I'd much rather go out and buy a storage card than rely on a software-based solution.

[shawnc]

Scam.



Short, sweet, and most importantly, RIGHT ON POINT! This is as bogus as they come.

[MasterOfMoo]

The key thing that comes to mind is bad memories of "DriveSpace" and other compression tools from back on an old Win 3.x machine I had. The performance hit for those was painful for me.

Beyond that, no interest in the product anyway, I stick to the comment someone else has already made... Need more storage? Buy a bigger card.

[dMores]

stacker, drivespace ... there were even some ram-doubler programs that enlarged your physical ram by compressing it.

with 1gb cf and sd cards being as cheap as they are today, i guess the need for swelldisk should not really be given.
20 bucks can get you what ... 512Mb ?

[bcries]

Okay even though this type of thing is impractical, all forms of compression represent a processor-memory tradeoff. You just need to decide how far to take it...

Back in the day, I ran Windows 95 on a 386 (overclocked to 50 MHz) with 8 MB of RAM and a 500 MB hard drive. I used DriveSpace to make C: appear as 800 MB, and then left about 52 MB free on an H: partition for the swap file. Oh yeah... VGA screen.

That was probably taking it too far... but to a grade 8 student with old hardware, Win95 really WAS that much better than Win3.1 I learned VB on that machine... ah, the memories :cry:

[PJE]

I think calling this application a SCAM is being very disrepectful of the programmer who built the application.

I think his claims are probably 'best case' as it's probably a zip style compression, and so dependant on the type of files you are storing (ie no good for jpegs and mp3s, divx, etc) but to call it a scam is I feel wrong.

My 2c

[PiatekHS]

If it's so great, why no trial version.

Personally, I never buy software that can't be tested. I also agree that for the money you're better off buying a new SD/CF card.

[spoirier]

I also think calling is a SCAM is disrespectful as well. I used a product similar to SwellDisk call FlyZip on my Palm Tungsten C which works very well:

http://www.fly-zip.com/flypage.php?code=FLYZIP-XR

As far as the 300% claim, it is just possible their English language skills could use a little help as their website is hosted in Thailand. They should have said 'will enlarge up to 300%'.

It is unfortunate that they do not provide a demo version.

[Darius Wey]

I think calling this application a SCAM is being very disrepectful of the programmer who built the application.

I think it's good that you've highlighted the brighter side of this discussion. While it is unfortunate that a trial version has not been made available, I wouldn't go so far as to call this a scam. Whether you're looking at the PC or Pocket PC, disk compression software exists and this is just another example of it. 300% is a pretty decent claim which is why I'd be interested in seeing how well this works. But like I said, an easy way out of storage problems would be a bigger memory card. Yet there's no reason why SwellDisk can't be given a decent lookover.

[alabij]

The key thing that comes to mind is bad memories of "DriveSpace" and other compression tools from back on an old Win 3.x machine I had. The performance hit for those was painful for me.

Beyond that, no interest in the product anyway, I stick to the comment someone else has already made... Need more storage? Buy a bigger card.

Drivespace, Boy! I'm almost nostalgic. When it first came out in DOS 6.2 I thought it was the greatest gift from Microsoft. Back then I had an 80MB hard drive and it gave me about 40MB more. Of course on an 80386SX there was significant speed loss.

I don't think its a scam. The sellers should just emphasize who should use it. Obviously if you already have compressed files on your card ie MP3/WMA/JPEG there might be little or no change.
However consider if you had Access files only, active compression could give you even up to five times more space. Now that may be worth the money

[Jonathan1]

comes to mind is bad memories of "DriveSpace"


*rolls on the ground screaming in pain* Make the memories stop! MAKE THEM STOP!!

DriveSpace and Stacker was a painful period in my life. Sort of like puberty for the computer industry. Hardware was just not quite there yet. A painful and awkward time.

[Ed Hansberry]

stacker, drivespace ... there were even some ram-doubler programs that enlarged your physical ram by compressing it.
Stacker, DriveSpace and Doublespace all did what they claimed in their day - they effectively doulbed your disk space. EXEs and DLLs compressed very little, but .INI files, documents and the like could see 8 or even 10 to 1 compression, so on average, you doubled.

RamDoublers worked on their intended platform - the Mac. It had a real hokey memory allocation scheme. You had to tell it to allocate so much MB of ram to an app and when that app loaded that much RAM was given to it and couldn't be used by other apps. The RamDoublers tricked the Mac into thinking it had allocated that much space but in reality, only allocated what the program was really using, which is how the current Mac works and how Windows has always worked, even going back to 3.0. THe scam with that came when they sold it for WIndows machines and it did little more than help clean up resources on the 16bit OS, which could help but it had really nothing to do with RAM but those 64K heaps.

[foebea]

The website does mention a demo version, but I have found no links other than the purchase links on that page.

Also there's a great bit down towards the bottom of the page, it says that you do not need a pc to install this software because "SwellDisk is the first program that can install direct to your PDA. "
:mrgreen:

[Ward]

I stand by my claims that it is a scam. There are just too many apps out there that claim to do so much, but actually deliver so little. Its worse in the PPC market - there are thousands of fluff apps that in most other markets, it would be unthinkable to charge money for.

This app in particular - its claims of boosting file storage capability three-fold is patently false. The only possible way of demonstrating this is if a user only stores easily compressible data such as text files. A job that Pocket Zip could do oh so much better. The average user will store mp3s and DivX/Xvid movies alongside reference works such as Tomeraider, Repligo files. None of which complement disk compression.

If ludicrous claims are going to be made, there had better be evidence, or I reserve the right to challenge them. And taking money from those unaware is nothing less than a...

SCAM.

I demand much higher standards for $39.99!

[Jay_Frase]

I had to try it. After installing and restarting the OS, my 4GB CF microdrive, which only had around 300MB left, showed I had over 8GB left, with only 3.6GB used. Now this card holds all of my music (WMA) and around 1.5GB of Divx AVIs.

My 1GB SD card has the vast majority of my applications and databases on it. I don't remember how much of it was used before I installed this app, but now it says I'm using 263.5MB with 2641.25MB free. So I ran a few programs to see how fast they loaded. I couldn't tell the difference. The programs, even those that used databases on the card, loaded, what appeared to be, just as fast as before.

It appears that this program really works and is not a scam. But then, only time will tell. However, for now, I'm a happy user. :D

[Ed Hansberry]

I had to try it. After installing and restarting the OS, my 4GB CF microdrive, which only had around 300MB left, showed I had over 8GB left, with only 3.6GB used. Now this card holds all of my music (WMA) and around 1.5GB of Divx AVIs.
How long did it take to install and compress? I would have guessed it would take half an hour to compress everything.

Also, can you put that MD in another machine that doesn't have this installed and see what the true used/free space is?

[DustyLBottoms]

It's not enough to say "it says I have more space"

Take a known quantity (say 8 GB of mp3s) and attempt to load them up of the CF card. Then see if you run out of space, Then access the MP3s on the CF card to see if they're really there or not.

[snayar]

I have tested two products that claim the same results on my Pocket PC Phone and Pocket PC.

1. StackDriver .NET V3.0
2. SpeedZip Optimized v1.0 (for XDAII)

The first one worked flawlessly on my Toshiba e310, the second one didn't work at all, it froze my XDAII.

The compression takes place on-the-fly and there was no performance decrease whatsoever!

But I agree that they are expensive and it's better to have a hardware solution instead of a software solution to the not-enough-space problem.

[Sydney Bristow]

Apparantly, they do have a demo/trial version at PocketGear (http://www.pocketgear.com/software_detail.asp?id=17412). I haven't tried it yet, but just thought I'd post this so anyone interested can give it a try. :)

[HTK]

The demo is a 0 byte file called "no_demo.cab".

And I too think that calling it a scam is excessive until we have further info about the application.

[Gerard]

On PocketGear's page you linked to, it shows a 'Download' button, says "Download trial:" and then says "(0K)". That's very small.

I tapped through the successive pages and finally got a downoad dialogue... and a 0-byte file. Maybe one must download using a PC? But then, what about that bit on Handango where it's supposedly installable without a PC? And here on PocketGear it says "please move the file to your PDA then tap its icon" which kinda implies a downloaded CAB file... which I'm just not seeing.

Somebody had better get their little developer act together, all this attention will be for naught. Similar conclusions are being drawn on PPCSG...

[Gerard]

Ah yes, now I have a shiny new copy of 'no_demo.cab' for my testing pleasure. Tried in PIE first and got 'downloadi.asp' instead, so trying NetFront was necessary to get the 'real' demo.

Problem: no_demo means no demo. And yet on the PocketGear page they detail how the allegedly available demo version can only compress files up to 16,384bytes, where there is no size limit for the full version. I call either incompetence or scam, and either way they are not getting control of my data nor my money. Why list a demo, describe it, then provide only a silly CAB file with no function?

[GermanGuy]

At this point, it appears to be a scam. Sadly, I paid for the program. The size of my storage card supposedly increased from 1 to 3 MB, but you cannot put anything beyond 1 MB on the card.

[Gerard]

The size of my storage card supposedly increased from 1 to 3 MB, but you cannot put anything beyond 1 MB on the card.

You have a 1MB card? Whoa! Must be ancient! I've never seen one smaller than 4MB, the kind they supply with the very cheapest digital cameras... only these days they're more likely to be 64MB.

[maximus]

You have a 1MB card? Whoa! Must be ancient! I've never seen one smaller than 4MB, the kind they supply with the very cheapest digital cameras... only these days they're more likely to be 64MB.

ha ha ha. :rofl: very MEAN :p

[GermanGuy]

All right. I meant 1GB not 1 MB. You guys are not making me feel better for shelling out 30+$ for a program that does not work

[omnytex]

PocketPCs already do on-the-fly compression to internal memory... anyone know if it does the same to removable media? Logically the answer *should* be no, otherwise how would it be compatible with a desktop PC? But, I'm wondering if there isn't some hidden registry setting to do this lurking somewhere, waiting to be discovered?

Sorry to hear that anyone shelled out money for this program... I'd be willing to try a demo, but I'd never buy something like this sight unseen... I suspect it isn't an outright scam, it probably does typical on-the-fly compression, which means it probably will seem to boost space, not nearly to the claimed and obviously theoretical 300% (sure, if all I store is files with contents like AAAAAAAABBBBBBBBBBCCCCCCCCC, I might well get 300% more effective space!) and probably hurts performance noticeably. In other words, it is probably no different than any other similar solution on any computer to date.

Speaking as someone who wrote their own OS some years ago that included on-the-fly compression in the file system, this is what I suspect is the case here.

[Gerard]

Sorry GermanGuy. no harm intended. On their PocketGear page this company says "30 day money back warranty" but only if you paid by PayPal. I haven't investigated as to whether they even sell via PayPal... but perhaps you could ask for a refund anyway?

[Sydney Bristow]

Ah, pity...sorry, I didn't verify the demo/trial version to be available as they claim it to be. ^^;

[carphead]

If you brought it by Pockgear or Handango you can ask for a refund if you can prove it doesn't work as advertised.

I've done it with a couple of apps before.

[caubeck]

At this point, it appears to be a scam. Sadly, I paid for the program. The size of my storage card supposedly increased from 1 to 3 GB, but you cannot put anything beyond 1 GB on the card.


I think this observation has been overlooked.

So, the display says 3GB but it doesn't let you load more than 1GB? That in itself needs explaining. Were you trying to load photos or mp3s or documents, or what?

I was tempted to buy this product myself before I did a bit of research into it. The no-trial at PocketGear isn't unique, I've seen that happen before.




Go go gadget ARMs

[Jerry Raia]

If the name "Swelldisk" doesn't scare you off what will?

[Patrick Y.]

All right. I meant 1GB not 1 MB. You guys are not making me feel better for shelling out 30+$ for a program that does not work

How many files and folders do you have on your card? Once, I couldn't put more than 201 MB of data on my 512MB card. Afterwards, I found out that you can only write minimum amount of data to root. I fixed the problem by relocating the folders inside each other.

[GermanGuy]

I requested a refund from both the developer and Pocketgear, but surprise, surprise have not heard from either.
All my requests for support have been ignored by the developer. This whole thing is really fishy.
If Pocketgear does not issue me a refund, this will be the last time I bought anything from them.
As soon as you install the program on the PDA, all storage media are immediately shown as having tripled in size including file storage and cards. There is no way however to take advantage of the supposed increase in space. I have tried it a hundred different ways.

[dMores]

[...] there are thousands of fluff apps that in most other markets, it would be unthinkable to charge money for.[...] like that program for the unbeatable price of $4.99 that will turn your PDA into a flashlight?
and for only $9.99 you get the deluxe edition that will also let you show warning signals etc.

heheh :)

btw .. by "ramdoubler" i meant programs that enlarge your ram, not a specific program called "ramdoubler".
there was some kind of program like that for the PC as well, i think it was during the win95 era ...

[CAR]

I purchased "Speedzip", which seems to be an earlier version of "Swelldisk", for my Ipaq 4705. The program did *not* work, even after five days of doing everything including a hard restart and beginning from the beginning. Once my CF card was full, it was *full* no matter what extra space the card showed. I couldn't put anything in that 'extra' space. Plus, it locked up my Ipaq several times, and when I reported that the 'convert' part of the program wasn't working, they told me I didn't need that part of the program. I never even showed any space savings in the Ipaq file store.

Tech support was nonexistant, and "It should work" it just about the only answer I received. After asking for a refund on 19 Feb 05, I *still* have not gotten a refund, and they're ignorning me. So I know their refund policy is a lie.

If you buy the program from their web site, through Paypal, then Paypal won't get involved. Once you get a 'product' they say that it's then between you and the seller.