How small are these devices? I think the other problem is that neither BTRFS nor zfs really are suitable for removable devices, and definitely not for ones smaller than probably 8Gb at the very least.

Unlike NTFS which is just a file system, both BTRFS and ZFS do volume management too, so it’s not just a single partition thing; they prefer to take over an entire volume and manage everything.

So while they’re the closest filesystem with NTFS-like transparent compression…..they don’t match exactly.

I also hazard to guess if the devices you’re using are too small to accept a BTRFS formatted volume, no amount of compression is going to be enough to fit what you need.

If you just want to play with a bunch of small old devices…..maybe play with LVM and small RAID arrays and configurations instead. You can the build a bigger volume out of a bunch of those disks together and then put a BTRFS or zfs volume on them. Can be fun to experiment and learn with anyway.

How small is your smallest device? BTRFS doesn't have a minimum size, but practically probably 50-100mb is just about doable before even just setting things up get complex. Having said that though, it's copy-on-write and has overhead as a result, so may not function well below 1gb.

ZFS meanwhile really won't work well below probably 8gb. It's also copy-on-write but with a lot more overhead due to how it works. It really works best on big drives and filesystems.

If your old storage is in the mb range, then really neither will help you achieve what you want.

BTRFS and ZFS do offer the same benefits as NTFS with regard to compression and speeding up some slower devices (due to lowering the actual read/writes needed to achieve the same result as the data is compressed into a smaller space and decompressed rapidly by the PC in memory), but NTFS can go be used on much smaller disk sizes due to how it works. BTRFS and ZFS are designed and optimised with other benefits in mind. And NTFS compression isn't well supported in Linux.

For ZFS check the instruction for your distribution here: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/index.html

PM me if you need help with ZFS. I've gotten quite good at setting it up.

How small is that device??? Didn't even knew btrfs has a minimum size.

After for zfs, you probably have to install some software or kernel patches

Xfs and zfs are two different filesystems.

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 dwar which you can mount and play with configs and saves in your ~.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/80305/mounting-a-squashfs-filesystem-in-read-write

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

Could that be due to a failing SD card or flash memory? The uncompressed data might be getting corrupted too, it just wouldn't return you an error depending on the file type (text documents for example would never error, they would just end up with garbled text).

Based on your other comments, if you're using an old 128mb SD card, this seems kind of likely. I've had many SD cards and USB sticks go bad after files have been copied on and off of them too many times.

The fstab file is used to define how disk partitions or remote file systems are mounted into your computer. Removable drives such as USB drives or SD cards are not shown there, because if they were, your system would complain at boot that it can't find the requested USB drive.

About F2FS having double the storage space of btrfs. In all honesty, it doesn't make sense to me. Do you mean it shows you potentially being able to store 80 megabytes if you can get compression working or does it just show 80 megabytes instead of 40, after formatting the file system?

BTRFS and ZFS both use block compression, ZFS by default. It's meant to increase both storage efficiency and access speed and has nearly zero impact on performance. The files aren't compressed from the filesystem point of view, which would satisfy your requirement not to need any other tools.

I'm confused about your statement that you don't want to save space with compression, but you indicated that you want to "make the most of your storage". Are you looking for long-term archiving?

Probably been mentioned already, but ZFS and BTRFS have options for full disk compression. Though there is cpu overhead with higher compression settings.

running games on old storage devices that hold less than 32 GB and have terrible read and write speeds.

I'm confused. How about copying that to newer storage devices?

Also typically game assets are VERY well compressed so I would suggest doing a comparison with/without compression before a full on migration. Compression tools help but aren't magical. If your assets are e.g. .jpg or .mp4 or .mp3 or a combination of that (as typically game assets are, including 3D models with their textures) then you can test yourself to .zip them (or bzip2 or whatever you prefer) and you will seem some gains but they'll be nearly negligible, e.g. < 10% reduction.