A system and method are provided for estimating compressibility of data in a storage device. This is accomplished by actually running a compression algorithm on at least one data element in a storage device, without necessarily storing the compressed data. By this feature, the results of the compression may be compared with the original data element, to gauge an extent to which a compression algorithm is effective in compressing data in the storage device. To this end, in various embodiments, a user may be better able to estimate compression algorithm effectiveness before actually implementing the same.