Microsoft publicly demonstrated the effectiveness of its SMB Compression process at an online event, which intervenes transparently for users during data transfer. The effect of compression depends heavily on the content transmitted – the more redundancy the file contains, the easier it can be compressed.

For the For the demonstration, the appropriately prepared command line tool robocopy was used first without and then with the new parameter / compress: While the conventional transfer took about two minutes, the SMB-compressed transfer was already after 23 Seconds ended. In addition to robocopy, according to Microsoft, xcopy and Hyper-V Live Migration are already planned for the use of SMB Compression.

A file format that is already highly compressed requires just as much transmission capacity as without compression . SMB Compression therefore first checks whether the file can be compressed significantly at all. If this is not possible, for example with common photo and video formats, SMB Compression does not even intervene to reduce latency and CPU load, for example in video conferences.

The optimized transmission should be yours However, there are advantages when transferring images of virtual machines, CAD files or uncompressed images, for example in raw formats, and will also take place automatically in the future, especially since SMB compression is already part of Windows 10 . Microsoft uses different compression algorithms, one of which SMB Compression selects before the transmission begins. A publication date for the corresponding applications is still pending. (un)