Hard Drive - Extracting Files... slow

buckeejit · 13 Apr 2013 at 15:52

Over the past while, I've been extractings rar files onto an internal drive... the original rar files that were to be extracted were on the same drive. Problem I'm having is that it takes around 1 hour to extract an 8GB file (split into a few files)

Winrar freezes constantly when extracting files and I have to use 7Zip now.

I've reformated and it hasn't fixed the problem. I was wondering if anyone would have any clues?

I have Windows Vista... don't know what other info is needed :confused:

Orcvader · 13 Apr 2013 at 15:56

8gb is kinda large. What is your system specs? And 7zip is the better one to use anyway: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/winrar-winzip-7-zip-magicrar,review-32652.html

buckeejit · 13 Apr 2013 at 15:58

Orcvader said:
8gb is kinda large. What is your system specs? And 7zip is the better one to use anyway: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/winrar-winzip-7-zip-magicrar,review-32652.html

Windows Vista
Intel Core 2 Quad @ 2.50GHz
4GB DDR Ram

rpstewart · 13 Apr 2013 at 16:40

Extracting to the same drive is never going to be quick. Short of additional hardware there's nothing that's going to speed things up much.

buckeejit · 13 Apr 2013 at 16:48

rpstewart said:
Extracting to the same drive is never going to be quick. Short of additional hardware there's nothing that's going to speed things up much.

Oh Really? I thought that it would have been the quickest way tbh. Thanks.

BlackAle · 13 Apr 2013 at 17:22

Orcvader said:
8gb is kinda large. What is your system specs? And 7zip is the better one to use anyway: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/winrar-winzip-7-zip-magicrar,review-32652.html

Nothing wrong with Winrar. That link is rather pointless to the OP's query, as it's about compression, not decompression.

HangTime · 14 Apr 2013 at 21:09

buckeejit said:
Oh Really? I thought that it would have been the quickest way tbh. Thanks.

No, extracting to the same drive is the worst thing you can do, since you will be writing to and reading to the drive at the same time (on a full, fragmented mechanical drive this can decimate performance). My recommendation is to extract to a different drive with a fast write speed (e.g. SSD), there may be some other considerations like saturation of the controller but I'm not an expert on the most efficient setup in that regard.

morfmedia · 15 Apr 2013 at 19:25

Windows Vista is also awful

melvis · 16 Apr 2013 at 11:14

cpu is usually the limiting factor in decompression for older systems rather than disk write speed i find, your 6 year old cpu is most likely the limit on your decompression speed

Clav · 16 Apr 2013 at 13:57

buckeejit said:
Oh Really? I thought that it would have been the quickest way tbh. Thanks.

If you right-click and use the explorer menu to 'Extract here' or 'Extract to folder' then it will be extracting from and to the same drive at the same time. However if you open up the archive in 7zip first and then drag the file from the archive to the destination it will unzip it first into your temp folder and then copy from there to the destination. This 2nd option may be quicker for you.

Also compressing/uncompressing is fairly dependant on the CPU as well as the drives. I don't think your 2.5Ghz clock speed is doing you any favours, especially with archives that size.