In short, yes. Windows has a checkbox in the settings somewhere (I think the partition manager? I can’t remember now) to enable compression on a given partition, so you can in effect enable filesystem compression on the C: drive. Through the command line you can also compress individual directories with different compression algorithms and I had incredible luck compressing game files with LZX compression with some games compressing down by 3 or 4 times (these were notably games with 100s of gigabytes of user-generated assets. More normal games only saw around a 20-40% reduction in storage space usage, which isn’t bad at all)
Outside of Windows there’s popular filesystems like zfs and btrfs which support filesystem compression and general encourage it by default because the speed of (de-)compression after reading from disk is almost always faster than just reading the uncompressed data from the disk directly
In short, yes. Windows has a checkbox in the settings somewhere (I think the partition manager? I can’t remember now) to enable compression on a given partition, so you can in effect enable filesystem compression on the C: drive. Through the command line you can also compress individual directories with different compression algorithms and I had incredible luck compressing game files with LZX compression with some games compressing down by 3 or 4 times (these were notably games with 100s of gigabytes of user-generated assets. More normal games only saw around a 20-40% reduction in storage space usage, which isn’t bad at all)
Outside of Windows there’s popular filesystems like zfs and btrfs which support filesystem compression and general encourage it by default because the speed of (de-)compression after reading from disk is almost always faster than just reading the uncompressed data from the disk directly