[forgettableuser]

Wait. Aren't the numbers for SSDs, particularly the bus speeds for the SATA connection measured in Gigabits (not bytes)?

Looking at these numbers you linked to (which seem to be in megabytes, it seems to me that decompression speeds could keep up. And I know write speeds on SSDs are a lot slower than the spec'd numbers, so the compression write speeds look plausible to me too.

The general idea is that modern CPUs tend to be instruction starved and sit idle because they are waiting on the slow memory buses that connect everything.

Am I missing something?