Hopefully this is my final edit before getting a full solution but I just want to say that if you are going to either resort to belittling me for not using better/newer hardware or you make it obvious that you haven’t fully read the post before commenting, I’m not going to respond to your comment.
In Windows, there’s a file/folder option called “Compress contents to save disk space”. What it does is it compresses the files, as the name suggests, but leaves them accessible as though they aren’t. This doesn’t really have much of a benefit on newer storage devices but on older storage devices, in addition to saving space, it allows files to potentially read faster.
As I have some old storage devices that I want to run games from, I think this will be a great option to have if I could find something similar for Linux. I tried looking online myself but search engines are terrible and I couldn’t find anything though them. So, I decided to post about this here, to see if anyone knows of anything I could try.
Edit: I have figured out how to use BTRFS and enable what it calls “transparent file compression”. Games are running decently well and I’m able to run games that are much larger than the devices original capacity, so I’m going to use that on most of my old storage devices at least for the time being.
The only problem I’m having is that I want to use F2FS on my oldest storage device, as BTRFS takes up too much space on the device (when formatted to BTRFS, there’s only about 40MB of free space, while there’s about 80MB with F2FS) and I was told by multiple users that F2FS also supports transparent file compression, but I can’t get files to compress and I’m not getting any error messages to try and fix it. Based on what the documentation says, I’m supposed to do something like this:
sudo mkfs.f2fs -f -O extra_attr,inode_checksum,sb_checksum,compression /dev/mmcblk0p1
sudo mount -o compress_algorithm=zstd,compress_extension=* /dev/mmcblk0p1 '/home/j/mountpoint/128mb'
chattr -R +c '/home/j/mountpoint/128mb'
The device will mount like this but files aren’t compressing when added, nor are they compressed if using the last command after they’ve been moved.
There’s an interesting project called DwarFS. I have it on my todolist to check it out but as I understand it you basically create a compressed read-only archive that is mountable and readable just like any other disk - https://github.com/mhx/dwarfs . Maybe this is something for your use case?
Maybe for some things but because I’m using it for games, the “read-only” might limit what games I can use this with. I might still try it out though.
Funnily enough it’s often used in the pirate scene to distribute games. But only as archives.
Unfortunately I haven’t tested it so I cannot fully advise on that but I have seen some “repacks” on the high seas where a whole wine prefix with a game already installed was compressed to a single
dwarwhich you can mount and play with configs and saves in your ~.I know it’s not advisable, I’m just a little crazy.