As we know, USB flash drives are generally very slow in data transfer rates. USB 3 has significantly increased the rates data transfers, but it's still much slower than even traditional mechanical HDDs - and many people still do not own the hardware to benefit from the new revision.
Also, compression/decompression slows down opening and saving files, but I would imagine that this is only true for I/O on an HDD/SSD/SSHD where the transfer rates are faster than the rates of a USB drive.
Is anyone aware of any performance tests that shows potential benefits from compressing an entire USB flash drive (particularly USB 2.0)? I would imagine that a computer's processor can decompress a file much faster than the USB can read an uncompressed file - so the larger the compression is on a USB - the less time it would take to read while the much faster processor can decompress a file quickly.
I would like to add a side note that I do not want to consider highly compressed media such as .jpg or encoded video where there will be little to no benefit from further compression. I am mostly talking about compression that would be in the range of 10%+ savings in disk space.
