Archivers Roundup

A Review by Laurent Recently I found a website with lots of excellent benchmarks: http://www.maximumcompression.com I was immediately surprised by the exceptionnal performance of two archivers totally unknown to me: WinRK http://www.msoftware.co.nz PAQ8JD http://www.cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/compression By mere curiosity, I tried both of them on the content of a sample file (I chose ztw160rc12.zip, size 1,342,719 bytes). PAQ8JD is a console archiver, open source and very powerful, but very limited in options and horribly slow. It took 426 seconds to compress the directory to 926,095 bytes. Okay, impressive, but unpractical. More a geek tool. WinRK is a GUI archiver unfortunately both proprietary and shareware. It has to most counterintuitive and bloated interface I ever saw. It gave me excellent compression ratios at 980,940 bytes in 162 seconds (maximum) and 1,076,246 in 7 seconds (fastest). However, I had *lots* of "read-memory errors" with the program and had difficulties to run it without crashing on my system. Not stable enough and no productive interface IMHO. In comparison: -WinRAR took less than 2 seconds to compress the directory to 1,139,543 bytes (Maximum) -UHarc took 4.1 seconds to get 1,127,724 bytes (maximum) -7zip took 3 seconds to get 1,114,429 bytes (maximum) -WinZip 11 took approx 2 seconds to get 1,344,594 (normal) and 3 seconds to get 1,197,711 (maximum, non 100% backward compatible) Summary:

2,657,979	0 sec	Directory uncompressed
1,344,594	2 sec	WinZip 11 (normal)
1,342,719	0 sec	ZIP (as downloaded from Zedtek)
1,197,711	3 sec	WinZip 11 (maximum)
1,139,543	1.5 sec	RAR (Maximum, solid)
1,127,724	4.1 sec	UHarc (Maximum))
1,114,429	3 sec	7zip (Maximum )
1,076,246	7 sec	WinRK (fastest))
980,940	162 sec	WinRK (Maximum)
926,095	426 sec	PAQ8JD (Default)

This quick home test confirmed my loyalty to WinRAR. It has a good compromise between speed and size. It also has a good GUI interface (IMHO, much better than 7zip and UHarc) and a good console version. It can uncompress many formats, and compress both ZIP and RAR (in GUI version only), which is the best of two worlds (nothing that can offers WinZip). It has, by far, one of the most comprehensive selection of switches, which is perfect for batch processing. Finally, few months ago, in a bold move to promote the RAR format, the makers of WinRAR gave away to the world, for ONE day only, a FREE licence key for version 3.51. So, there is a "free version" of WinRAR that you can now download from here: WinRAR3.51.zip (975.85 Kb) This archive contains both the original installer (not anymore available on makers' website) and the key. Perfectly legit, even in corporate environment. Note that the license key is only valid for 3.51 and cannot be used in later versions of WinRAR.

Free RARing with ZTreeWin

Once WinRAR installed and registered, you can copy the following files from the WinRAR folder to your ZTree directory. From now on, you will be able to compress file in RAR format from within ZTree.

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