[cmurphycode]

You are correct that most compression algorithms are slower than their corresponding decompression, which means the writes tend to be a different tradeoff than the reads.

I do not agree with your statement that compress + write is always slower, though. The analysis for cost/benefit of compression is the exact same logic for both reads and writes, but with different formulas based on how fast you can compress/decompress and read/write blocks. Let's imagine that your disk takes 10ms to write 64KB and 20ms to write 256KB. Then if compression of a 256KB block down to 64KB takes 5ms, writing is faster with compression done first. On the other hand, if compressing it takes 50ms, then writing it raw is quicker.