A Extremely Fast Read Speed File System

Question

Other day i was playing a game and get annoyed with the long loading times between levels, then i raise a question to myself...
There is no File System optimized for Read Speed?
I did not want one "bloated" with journaling, snapshots and all those nice all use optimizations.
I just want a plain Bare, Very simple, File System that is indisputably fast at Read Speed!
It can also be processor demanding, it is not a problem for this use case...
Someone know a File System Like that?
What is the viability(and complexity) to make one?
Sorry by the bad english!

Answer 1

This is just a guess here but how much data do you need to load?
If it is a lot of MB not even the best filesystem in the world can speed that up, to make things worse I'm guessing that you aren't loading the data from contiguous files on the HD.
To add another variable to the way hard disks perform there is the possibility of having some data compressed and this will make it depend on how fast is your cpu.
As far as I know some compression formats although very efficient can have a very big speed penalty, also the speed and configuration of you memory subsystem can impact performance as well. Also if the data is compressed in a way that you can't use multiple cores to decompress it then it doesn't matter if you have a system with a single core cpu of one with 100 cpus.
Sometimes having as much ram as you can will be the best option, sometimes having the fastest ram possible is best.
To make things worse, newer systems seem to add another degree of complexity to this as for some loads one type of memory association is better and for other loads other type of association is better (I'm thinking of ganged / unganged configuration in the bios).
In my experience, when using ext3, if you add noatime and nodiratime to the mount option you will get a bit better performance, of course different filesystems will have different performance when reading but as far as I know no filesystem is the best of all for everything, so consider your overall experience.
Is it worth having a system that can have a speed penalty when used in everyday tasks just for the sake of having one game load the levels faster? Also how long will you be playing that particular game? Is it worth all the trouble just for one game you will stop playing in a couple of months?
On the use of SSD hard drives .... I've been more tempted to get one before but .... although read speed and access times are first class it seems there is more to this kind of drives than what meets the eye, some drives seem to behave terribly when writing under certain conditions (typically when there are multiple write requests), again the overall speed of the system, not just when using one program.
After considering all the benefits and downsides if you still really want faster load times for that game then the best way to find out the faster filesystem is to try them all and time the load times.
Happy benchmarking .