Most SAS tasks are CPU-bound, not I/O-bound. CPU performance is cheap these days, and has increased a lot faster than storage performance. These factors mean that compression if often a worthwhile trade-off. SPDE compression is especially impressive, usually reaching 80 to 90%, even for narrow tables. A whole chapter is dedicated to this in this book https://www.amazon.com/High-Performance-SAS-Coding-Christian-Graffeuille/dp/1512397490