Patent ID: 8190742

Claim:
A distributed, differential electronic-data storage system comprising: component data-storage systems that together provide data storage for the distributed, differential electronic-data storage system; and a routing component configured to direct data objects, received from client computers, through logical bins to the component data-storage systems by a data-compression-enhancing method, wherein the routing component is configured to further calculate an efficiency-metric value for the distributed, differential electronic-data storage system by: generating an original data object by a random data-generation system; generating a number n of data objects from the original data object by making the number of successive, random, one-byte changes to the original data object; storing the n data objects in the distributed, differential electronic-data storage system; determining the size of a memory used to store the n data objects in the distributed, differential electronic-data storage system; and computing the efficiency-metric value based on a ratio of the determined size of the memory used to store the n data objects in the distributed, differential electronic-data storage system and the sum of the sizes of the n data objects.