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.
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.
I’m rewriting the old portion for clarification:
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.
It’s because I’m trying to preserve my hard drives. Also, believe it or not, a lot of the games I have are not already compressed that well and I have games that are over 4GB that will now fit on my 1GB flash drive because of BTRFS’s transparent file compression and they run decently this way. Obviously, not all games are like this, there’s only a few that can be compressed that well, but it does seem like the average might be closer to 2 to 2.5 GB for the games I have, which is still much more than I was expecting.
On a side note, this kind of comment is the exact reason I was considering not posting this. I know what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. I hate it when people are like “why do something this way when this way is better”. I chose to do this, this way, because of the reason I mentioned above. If I was some billionare, like Jeff Bezos, not only would I be using SSDs exclusively, I wouldn’t be playing games on a 200$ laptop that I bought refurbished from Amazon. I’m unemployed and my only means of making money is through online sites which don’t pay well, I’m trying to do what I can with what I have.