I feel like some kind of compression is the way to go if you are interested in fast reads/writes. Depending on the algorithm used, you could probably decompress

I feel like some kind of compression is the way to go if you are interested in fast reads/writes. Depending on the algorithm used, you could probably decompress the data faster than it can be read off the disk. In an archive file, you would also have the same benefit of fewer read/write calls.