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.
Make sure you’re actually filling the volume, and also keep in mind reporting may be different (with or without filesystem index metadata, etc)
Also, you can simply use regular file systems and compressed files, and then use a RAM drive (assuming you have enough RAM free) and access the files that way instead
I’m just going by what Linux Mint’s file manager says and it’s saying that the used space is about 40 MB with f2fs while it was about less than half of that when it was formatted to ext4.
What’s a RAM drive? I have 8 GB of RAM and I have ZRAM enabled, so I should have enough RAM for most of the files I’d consider using it for.
RAM drive is when you hold the entire file system in RAM, it’s used for stuff like Linux Live CD boot with no writable storage but you can use it for anything.
Is it read-only, or does it write the files at some point?