An update for Windows 11 is offering a new SMB compression feature that could make file transfers much smoother for IT admins.
SMB compression allows an administrator, user, or application to request compression of files as they transfer over the network.
This removes the effort involved in manually compressing and decompressing a file, causes less congestion for the other files on the network, and files take less time to transfer, at the cost of slightly increased CPU usage during transfers.
What’s different here?
SMB compression functionality has been included in all the previous iterations of Windows 11.
However, the new update will enable you to apply the compression to files under 100MiB where it didn’t previously unless you were up to the task of modifying our system's registry.
In a blog post (opens in new tab) explaining the new addition, Microsoft’s Ned Pyle said the update will mean, “some smaller, less-compressible files will now get some useless CPU time spent trying to compress them”.
However, Pyle said the solution is simply to “know your files”.
The exec suggested avoiding compressing formats like JPG, ZIP, DOCX that are already compressed but applying them to large files with lots of “whitespace” like “ VHDX, ISO, DMP”.
If you're interested in giving the new feature a test drive you can find a complete rundown in this video (opens in new tab).
If you're an eager early adopter, you can get the new feature by installing optional Windows Server 2022 update KB5016693 (opens in new tab) or Windows 11 update KB5016691 (opens in new tab).
The new feature will generally make its way to Windows users during the company's upcoming Patch Tuesday launch, set for September 13 2022.
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