What speeds up RAR extraction the most?

ac1d1ty

ac1d1ty

ac1d1ty

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Current system

Q6600 stock
4gb ddr2 800 4-4-4-12
1tb hard drive
9600gt oc


For the next couple of months I'm going to be extracting quite large RAR files (20gb+). Is there any way that I can readily improve how fast they extract? I take its not a CPU issue as winrar never uses anywhere near 4 cores?


thanks
 
if your cpu isnt being stressed then possibly the hard drive bottle necking it ?

i imagine an SSD would speed things up but faster ram might too
 
Hard disks would be the weak link for extraction I would have thought. Extracting from one drive onto another would speed things up considerably.

Nate
 
does winrar cache as it goes? don't have the archive on the same drive as the cache, as then you are reading/writing to the same drive
 
I guess memoryspeed, memorysize and harddiskspeed.

Just start one and go and make a cup of tea, that way who cares if it takes 2 minutes or 10 minutes :)
 
oh i have no idea. :o

the software you use might make a difference too. i know theres rar extractors out there that claim to be faster than the rest but ive never tried them

just be thankful your not on OSX because my snow leopard installation is way slower at extracting rars than windows on bootcamp :(
 
Disabling AV temporarily will speed it up fair amount, found that in the past although not a great idea if you're unsure of the contents or where it came from.
 
My mates quad core extracts stuff a LOT faster than my dual core, so up to a point I think the CPU will affect extraction.

If CPU is not reaching its max capacity then I guess something else is bottlenecking it.
 
Unraring on my ssd is slower than 74gb raptor due low I/O speed.

Get another hard drive, unrar from one disk to other will be faster
 
Hard drive speed will be the main one probably as it's just bottlenecking on one drive, and disabling the AV is a free speed gain!

ac1d1ty said:
I take its not a CPU issue as winrar never uses anywhere near 4 cores?
Click to expand...

Then surely it is a CPU issue? :confused: Isn't it just maxing out one core whilst the others are doing nothing? Solution would be a) rewrite the application (and potentially the OS) so it's properly multithreaded and will max out all cores or b) increase the clock speed so (if it's not multithreaded properly) it maxes out one core @ 3.*GHz core rather than one 2.4GHz core.

EDIT: WinRAR is multithreaded? http://xona.com/2006/07/05e.html
 
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winrar always caches to your OS drive, its annoying. So writing from one drive to another is still going to cache on your OS drive.

Generally what i see happening is, The main drive extracts it, Once extracted it copies it over to the 2nd drive.

So copies it twice essentially :o quite annoying
 
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My Velociraptor, Q6600 and 4gb ram seems to chew through 15gb rar files. It was a lot faster when i got the drive and even faster when i upgraded to quad core and another 2gb. I can see all 4 cores working when extracting. (around 20% each)
 
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