I recently tested three tools for compressing 102 NetCDF files contain gridded rainfall data (138GB) and found 7-Zip to be the best. Here’s a quick comparison:

Note: The tests were done on a multi-core machine, with 192 cores.

1. 7zz (7-Zip)

   7zz a -tzip test_archive.zip *.nc
   

   • Time: 1 minute 17 seconds
   • Final Size: 6.6GB
2. tar + gzip

   tar -cvzf test_archive.tar.gz *.nc
   

   • Time: 17 minutes
   • Final Size: 6.9GB
3. tar + pigz (Parallel gzip)

   tar cf - *.nc | pigz -p 150 > archive.tar.gz
   

   • Time: 6 minutes
   • Final Size: 6.8GB

If you’re dealing with large datasets, 7-Zip is the quickest and most efficient choice.