Should you enable or disable compression for files and folders?

Compression takes time. Every time you read or write data, the CPU will be loaded (used power and performance) and it takes longer.

Compression only brings something to uncompressed data. For texts (also HTML), you can save more than 50% space. Compressed data such as photos and especially videos can hardly be compressed or not at all. Properly strongly compressed data can even consume more space again compressed!

Previously, when hard drives were still a few hundred megabytes large and you did not store any music and even not videos, the compression made a lot of sense. Today the memory is so large and most of the data you store is already well compensated that a compressed internal hard drive has no advantage.

On the other hand, it looks different with very slow and small external data carriers. Here it becomes faster when fewer data are read and stored by the data carrier, the time saving is greater than the time that the CPU additionally needs to compress and decompress. You can also save a few files more on the disk. So with small cheap USB sticks that can only be described very slowly, the compression has many advantages. For this, you can only use the data carrier on the PC, other devices that you put the USB stick can not start with compression, so TV e.g.