Article Written By: stevemckarmik
If you have a 64GB SD card, then that is an awful lot of memory and most likely more than you will fill up in one go. This kind of space means as a rule that you will be able to store about 1,000 songs or more, hours of video and thousands of photos. However sometimes you will find yourself working with larger files. For example, if you are using your 64GB SD card in order to transfer files of whole films, then you may find you can only fit on one or two files. At the same time, if you need to store things like computer games or ROMS that you want to play on your phone or on other systems, then you again might find yourself needing to make more space. Of course the great thing about Flash memory is that you can expand it as you need. In other words, if you want to transfer multiple large videos at once - you can simply use multiple SD cards. However not everyone will always be able to afford multiple SD cards, or might not have them to hand. Fortunately there is another way: compressing. Compressing a file means that essentially you are making it smaller. Files are essentially filled up with its of information that tell your computer what sound to play out of what speaker or what coloured pixel to place where (with the translation for this code varying from format to format). For a hypothetical example a file might contain the digits 103,2,4 potentially mean to PSET a coloured dot one hundred and three pixels along, two down and in the colour red. The file would then be made up from hundreds of these and the programme that used them would be able to save images in this format to be read and reproduced later. Each pixel like this then means up to six digits which is a lot of space to save on the computer if it s a full screen picture.However what the compression software then does is to abbreviate this code by compiling it into another code to make it smaller. The actual programme would then no longer be able to read the file as it would now be in a different format, however the same programme used to compress it could then un-abbreviate it again for use. Thus you have created a smaller file size for transporting and for storing on your 64GB SD card etc. This way you could save maybe ten films to your card instead of 7 then simply de-compress them for use. Knowing how to compress files then means you can get greatly more use from your SD cards and some programmes and hardware will even be able to convert the data automatically meaning they can remain in this format.If you have a 64GB SD Card and you want to compress some files to fit more on then there are several compression formats for you. The most popular is .zip which is the most popular in Windows and which Windows can use out of the box. Simply right click on the folder and select 'send to zip' you can then open and view the files as though they were in a folder. An alternative meanwhile is rar which are also popular and which can be opened with the free programme '7zip'. It is possible to compress a file and make it a .rar and then to compress this further by putting it in a .zip folder.
This Article Has Been Published on Fri, 8 Oct 2010 and Read 373 Times