Actually we hit this point at least a decade ago; I remember getting improved performance by using a compressing filesystem for Windows 3.1. CPUs have been outrunning disks for a while, only the number of orders of magnitude has really changed.<p>Part of this is that even very cheap algorithms can consistently get "some" compression; as the article observes, bzip is still a net loss for many cases, but gzip-style compression has been better-than-free for a while now, as long as your CPU isn't loaded.