Windows: Will compressing the hard drive partition speed up disk access?

Question

In theory, on a reasonably fast PC, the processor is mostly idle during hard drive access.

A compressed file takes up less physical space, so the hard drive (being the slowest part in the system) has to read less physical data.

One could argue that the small additional amount of work for the processor to uncompress the data on the fly will not result in slowdown of the read operation, so hence my question:

If I activate drive compression on a Windows machine, can I positively affect data throughput at the expense of a somewhat higher CPU usage?

Answer 1

Some discussion on the subject here

http://ask.metafilter.com/51652/Could-turning-on-disk-compression-actually-speed-up-disk-access

and here

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=801882

too many variables for a direct answer.

Answer 2

One would think that the processor overhead would be less than the drive access overhead and that compressed partitions would be faster. However, my experience suggests that it's almost always slower compressed...