Hardware Lossless Compression for Hard Drives?

Posted by GeoffreyF67 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by GeoffreyF67
Published on 2009-01-29T19:59:15Z Indexed on 2010/05/08 23:48 UTC
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hard-drive

I happened across this article about hardware based hard drive encryption and realized that not only would this give a great way to protect your data but it would also speed up the applications that we use to encrypt that data.

This lead me to wonder...

Would it be possible to do the same thing for compression so that all of the data is compressed or uncompressed appropriately as it is read and written to the drive?

I haven't done any firmware programming in quite some time so I'm not even sure this is technically possible.

If it were, however, it could probably give quite a bit more storage space to folks.

What are the pros and cons of programming such an approach to be used in the firmware?

G-Man

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