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From: ifarqhar@sunb.mqcc.mq.oz.au (Ian Farquhar)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc
Subject: Re: A compression filesystem
Message-ID: <1226@macuni.mqcc.mq.oz>
Date: 18 Feb 91 00:39:52 GMT
References: <71.27BCCBB8@weyr.FIDONET.ORG>
Sender: news@macuni.mqcc.mq.oz
Organization: Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
Lines: 25

In article <71.27BCCBB8@weyr.FIDONET.ORG> David.Plummer@f70.n140.z1.FIDONET.ORG (David Plummer) writes:
>You know, for a very simplistic compression system, it should be able to 
>keep up with hard drive speed, shouldn't it?  

Only if you've got a very slow hard disk.

>We're not talking 
>Lempel-Zev at 400K/sec, but even repeated-pattern checking.  

LZ is really repeated pattern checking: the reduction of redundancy.

>There is a HD card (albeit this is hardware) in the AT world that does 
>something similar, and reportedly almost doubles your HD capacity in a 
>quite transparent manner.

Yes, there was.  The company sank without a trace under a mass of
lawsuits resulting from lost data on its product.  As for the system,
it was apparently just run-length encoding anyway, and in real use only
got about 20% packing, which was not worth the money or the hassle.

--
Ian Farquhar                      Phone : + 61 2 805-9400
Office of Computing Services      Fax   : + 61 2 805-7433
Macquarie University  NSW  2109   Also  : + 61 2 805-7420
Australia                         EMail : ifarqhar@suna.mqcc.mq.oz.au