What strategy for random accession of records in massive FASTA file?

[Chris Lasher]

>And besides, for long-term archiving purposes, I'd expect that zip et
>al on a character-stream would provide significantly better
>compression than a 4:1 packed format, and that zipping the packed
>format wouldn't be all that much more efficient than zipping the
>character stream.

This 105MB FASTA file is 8.3 MB gzip-ed.