As I mentioned in the title, I’m not looking to save space, I want to test something. In Windows, you could use this option on a folder and still access the contents and run executables while keeping the folder and it’s contents compressed. The benefit to doing this, outside of saving space, is that files could potentially be accessed faster on slower storage devices.
As I’ve been trying to get the most out of some old storage devices I have, I think that something like this would be a great option for this. The only problem is that I’ve tried looking online for a way to do this but search engines are terrible. So, I’m posting about this here in case someone knows of a way to do this.
Edit: I forgot to specify this but I’m trying this for gaming. I know it’s not recommended to this but as a result, I mostly need something that’s not read-only. It might work fine for some games but this obviously wont work for all games.
What are you saving on that drive? Many data file formats already have compression of their own and don’t benefit much from file system compression. So if this is for media files, for example, it’s likely to add CPU overhead without a big benefit in transfer speed.
ZFS is not installed by default with most Linux distributions due to its license. It’s something you install after the os. Btrfs should work, but I see some discussion online of 128 or 256MB minimum volume size.
I’m using it for games, I know it’s not really recommended to do that but I’m doing it anyways. I’m trying btrfs on one of my devices but I may need zfs for one of the others, however, I don’t know how to install it.