It seems that CPU increases have outpaced disk speed for a while. Assuming a desktop or laptop with modern dual core Intel/AMD CPU and a single average SATA disk, would doing compression on most all of the disk give better overall performance? Basically does the reduced disk bandwidth more than make up for the increased CPU load? I'm sure the real answer is "it depends on what you're doing". By asking this question, I'm hoping to have someone who has done this pipe up and give some examples or pitfalls.
On a modern system, will using disk compression give me better overall performance
compressionhard driveperformance
Best Answer
Yes, disk compression can provide better performance under particular circumstances:
There's a reason both ZFS and Btrfs, both recent green-field designs, include provisions for compression.
In the HPC space, when an application is checkpointing from memory to disk, the CPUs are frequently not doing anything useful at all. This time is essentially pure overhead. Any use of the CPUs to reduce this time is a win.