performance advantages of compressing a drive holding Mysql data in windows 2008

Question

I was wondering if compressing a windows drive holding MyISAM tables will produce any performance enhancements for MySQL queries.

Answer 1

It can produce better performance for SELECT queries (as it will read fewer bytes) but generally will slow down writes. Actually you can achieve the same with the ARCHIVE storage engine, which also compresses the data

Answer 2

Negative. Lemple Ziv compression of large files, assumes if you are to read a large file, it shall not be random-access based. But that is what exactly MySQL does - finds a pointer to the data through (cached) keys and reads the row from large data file.

As pointed out by @Darhazer, it is better to use MySQL archiving features.