K42.7z
Tell gzip/bzip2/7z/etc not to compress already-compressed files?
Scripts (e.g., PERL) can be written to customize compression levels based on file extensions. K42.7z
For large file sets, 7z provides multi-core compression, making it faster than many single-threaded alternatives. More details on using 7z with block devices ? 7z provides multi-core compression

