Archive for January, 2007

WinRAR vs. 7-Zip

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

I’ve been using WinRAR and 7-zip on stuff enough to give a guideline on which is better on which.

7-Zip
Ultra Compression, LZMA, 64MB dictionary, 273byte wordsize

  • NWN2 Modules that have Exterior Areas (3D-freehand)
  • Civ4 and Orbiter Addons (Many .dds files)
  • X-Plane addons over 16MB (marginal or slightly in favor of WinRAR for addons<8MB)
  • Source code files
  • Misc. Text Files
  • Office documents (none have macros)
  • SQL Server Database backup files
  • .csv and other delimited text files
  • Entire Application directories over 8MB

    • WinRAR
    Best Compression; 4096byte dictionary; Prediction Order 63 + 128MB memory for text files

  • NWNW2 Modules Lacking Exterior Areas (All Interior/tileset)
  • .exe and DLL files
  • .bmp and .wav files
  • 8 and 16-bit console/handheld roms and GBA + N64 ROMs
  • Precompressed installer .exe, .msi, and .rtp files (.zip is best for highly compressed ones)

    • Notes

  • 7-Zip is open source, but it is more bound to the windows OS than WinRAR is.
  • 7-Zip wants lots more RAM and is about half as fast as WinRAR
  • Don’t worry about speed. If you want speed, use PKZip 4.5+ at compression level 3, or THOR if it is pre-tarred or just a single file.
  • 7-Zip gets free benefit on very large archives (contents >16MB, especially >100MB) because it’s dictionary can be up to 128MB. WinRAR is limited to 4MB. PKZip 2.04g was 32KB, and deflate64 is 64KB.

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