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 (it seems to be around 2 to 2.5 times the original free space, on average), 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 that device.
When formatted to BTRFS, there’s only about 40MB of free space and with compression it can hold around 100MB worth of files. Meanwhile, there’s about 80MB of free space with F2FS and I was told by multiple users that F2FS also supports transparent file compression, which should get me around 200MB worth of files on that device because it’s documented to support the same compression methods as BTRFS. But I can’t get files to compress and I’m not getting any error messages to try and diagnose the problem. 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.
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?
The free space that I mentioned is both what Linux Mint’s file manager states and is what both files systems can hold on the SD card when compression is disabled. If I format the device to BTRFS and disable compression, I can only put 40MB of files onto the SD card. If I format the SD card for F2FS, it can hold about 80MB worth of files. If I format the SD card to BTRFS but enable compression, it says 40MB but it can hold around 100MB worth of files (at least with the files I’m testing). From what I’ve read and seen, if I can get compression working in F2FS, it’ll still say 80MB but probably hold around 200MB of files since, according to the documentation, both file systems support the same compression methods.