Btrfs transparent compression on external harddrive?

[leemu]

Hi everyone!

I just read and followed the tutorial in here and after using compsize on root and home I got 52% compression ratio (pretty impressive I’d say).

So my question is, should I enable this transparent compression in my external harddrives too?
Would transparent compression be useful if most files in my external hdd are videos? since videos format like .mkv are already compressed.

Thank you for the answer!

[rele (René Lesterhuis)]

Hi,

the answer is no. Like you say videos are already compressed so there’s not much btrfs compression can do extra. This is also true for e.g. jpg’s.