Zstd has a 4-byte magic number, which is used to check if the data is zstd encoded. In addition to that, this example has a 2 byte frame header (including the decompressed size), a 3 byte block header, and a 4 byte checksum at the end (which can be disabled with `--no-check`).
Zstd does have a mode that passes-through incompressible data, both for incompressible literals, and completely incompressible blocks (128 KB chunks).
For small inputs, we recommend using dictionary compression. But even with dictionary compression, because of our header costs, you won't generally see benefits until your data is at least ~50 bytes. But YMMV depending on your data.
Zstd does have a mode that passes-through incompressible data, both for incompressible literals, and completely incompressible blocks (128 KB chunks).
For small inputs, we recommend using dictionary compression. But even with dictionary compression, because of our header costs, you won't generally see benefits until your data is at least ~50 bytes. But YMMV depending on your data.