In the literature, all the known high-rate MDS codes with the optimal repair
bandwidth possess a significantly large sub-packetization level, which may
prevent the codes to be implemented in practical systems. To build MDS codes
with small sub-packetization level, existing constructions and theoretical
bounds imply that one may sacrifice the optimality of the repair bandwidth.
Partly motivated by the work of Tamo et al. (IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, 59(3),
1597-1616, 2013), in this paper, we present a powerful transformation that can
greatly reduce the sub-packetization level of any MDS codes with respect to the
same code length n. As applications of the transformation, four high-rate MDS
codes having both small sub-packetization level and near optimal repair
bandwidth can be obtained, where two of them are also explicit and the required
field sizes are comparable to the code length n. Additionally, we propose
another explicit MDS code that have small sub-packetization level, near optimal
repair bandwidth, and the optimal update property. The required field size is
also comparable to the code length n.