This year's MacHeist is coming soon / Is Squeeze worth it?

If you are a Mac user, don't miss this year's MacHeist software bundle, due to arrive March 2nd. MacHeist offers great niche software for free or nearly free. I usually find at least one piece of software in the bundle that I end up using regularly. Whatever else, it is cool to get your hands on new, high-quality, low-cost Mac software and take if for a spin.

Right now, MacHeist is offering a free license for LateNiteSoft's Squeeze for Mac. The idea sounds awesome--just like compressing directories on the PC. If you are not aware of the process, file compressors sit in between the OS's file access methods and the file system, and make the files work exactly as they did before, but compressing them on writes and decompressing them on reads on the fly. The amazing part--since physical file access is typically the slowest part of the read or write, compression reduces disk access but increases CPU time. Since CPU is very cheap compared to the physical access, you usually *improve* performance while you are decreasing disk usage. This makes disk compression under most circumstances a no-brainer.

But I had interesting results in using Squeeze. I had a directory of wave files that I tried to compress. The directory was around 200MB. Here is a screen capture of directory information from Path Finder:

Here is what I saw in Squeeze:

Hmmmmm. 22GB saved on a 200MB directory? For some reason, I am skeptical. I am a developer, so I know fairly minor things like this happen--it is no reason to dismiss a piece of software. But this was in addition to the fact that is kept running, and I was not seeing significant compression on any directories. Anybody else have any good or bad stories to relate on Squeeze for Mac?