Compressing USB Hard Drive - Performance Hit?

[HTWingNut]

Does anyone use hard drive compression on primarily an external hard drive used for backup/storage? I have a USB hard drive that I used primarily to backup my Steam games library. With games running 50-100GB it's just quicker to copy from USB hard drive to PC instead of redownloading all the files again if I delete them off my PC for whatever reason. Drive compression has been around a long while, and I know older PC's (like 10+ years), the CPU wasn't much up to the task, but is it really much of a burden for even a mediocre fairly modern CPU?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Compression should make it faster. The cpu overhead of ntfs compression is very low, and its faster to compress and write the smaller file than it is to read the file most of the time.