Re: Transparent compression in the FS

[Erik Mouw]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2003 at 05:50:38PM +0400, Nikita Danilov wrote:
> Erik Mouw writes:
>  > Nowadays disks are so incredibly cheap, that transparent compression
>  > support is not realy worth it anymore (IMHO).
> 
> But disk bandwidth is so incredibly expensive that compression becoming
> more and more useful: on compressed file system bandwidth of user-data
> transfers can be larger than raw disk bandwidth. It is the same
> situation as with allocation of disk space for files: disks are cheap,
> but storing several files in the same block becomes more advantageous
> over time.

You have a point, but remember that modern IDE drives can do about
50MB/s from medium. I don't think you'll find a CPU that is able to
handle transparent decompression on the fly at 50MB/s, even not with a
simple compression scheme as used in NTFS (see the NTFS docs on
SourceForge for details).


Erik

PS: let me guess: among other things, reiser4 comes with transparent
    compression? ;-)

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