Shall I compress my drives ?

[Quickshot]

Hello everyone ^^
Like you can see on the title, I'm just curious about something. I have one hard disk divided in three partitions. I used the option "Compress drive to save disk space" on two partitions that I use to store my games (not the one used by Windows).
Well, I just wanted to know if it could affect the performance of my games stored on the compressed partitions. I copied a file on the first partition (not compressed) from a CD and then copied that same file on the second partition (compressed) and noticed that it took a bit more time to copy on the compressed partition.
So... Will a "normal" partition deliver more performance on games that a compressed one ? Or the "compressed" status only affects file copying ?

 

[Nodsu]

Writing compressed files uses significant CPU resources and takes additional time as you already noticed. Reading is a cheaper operation, but it still impacts performance.

IMHO the transparent disk compression should be used only as a last resort if you are really low on disk space and for some odd reason any of the sensible solutions do not suit you.

In addition to the speed penalties, you make your filesystem extremely incompatible. One day when you need a recovery program to get your data back, you may regret it.

 

[Quickshot]

Thank you for your answer.
I've decompressed one of the drives there's two days now. I had to do a "little" defragment (the degree of fragmentation was 93% after the decompression O.o). I'll test the performance of the drive at the end of the week but I'm pretty sure it will be better than before.
Thanks again for answering ^^