Unzipping a 4.7GB File Speed

[mn072065]

Ok here is the magical question. I'm about to buy this Hitachi 0A34915 1TB 7200Rpm 32MB Cache SATA II Hard Drive. It's 32MB cache. So if I have a file that is 4.7GB compressed and I want to unzip it, will my speed be fast. How fast will it unzip? I have now windows Vista 64 with 4GB memory. Just curious how fast will it take. I'm currenlty using Powerarchiever 2007. Thanks

[aedipuss]

no faster then any other 7200rpm drive. the cache is only useful for small frequently accessed files. for working with large files sustained read/write speed is what's important. faster if you read from one physical drive and write to a separate physical drive.

[neomaine]

faster if you read from one physical drive and write to a separate physical drive.

No two ifs, ands, or buts about it. No drive will like to read and write to itself. Do youself a favor and buy two 500gb drives. Probably be cheaper anyway.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Vista does something that many would consider stupid (surely not!)

I discovered this when trying to unzip a very large archive on an external drive and it would keep failing. Here's why:

When you use Vista's built-in capability to uncompress a zip file, for some reason it unzips it to the system's TMP folder (e.g., C:\TMP). Once unzipped, it copies everything to your target location. Why? I have no idea. It makes the whole process painfully slow since so much stuff has to be copied from one place to another. But my problem was that I was running low on disk space and so it couldn't complete the uncompression.

Here's the key bit - let's say you have a system drive C: and two external drives D: and E:. You want to unzip a 4.7GB file from D: to E: Both drives have plenty of free space but C: has 2GB. The unzipping will fail and you will scratch your head for ages wondering why - unless you know the above 'secret'. The steps that occur are:

Unzip from D: to C:
Copy the uncompressed version from C: to E: unless C: doesn't have enough space.

If you cannot free up enough space on C:, the solution is to change the location of the TMP folder. In my case, I changed it to a different partition on my main drive.

In a similar manner, you may wonder why so much space is used by Vista. By default, Vista uses a paging file (pagefile.sys - just like other Windows) and can get quite big (a few GB if you have a lot of RAM). But it also uses a hibernation file (hiberfil.sys) which will be at least as big as your RAM. That's a lot of space used up. If you don't want to use hiberation, disable it and that enormous file will go away, freeing up a lot of valuable disk space. I came across this when I installed more RAM and my system partition went into the red.

[jagabo]

When you use Vista's built-in capability to uncompress a zip file, for some reason it unzips it to the system's TMP folder (e.g., C:\TMP). Once unzipped, it copies everything to your target location. Why? I have no idea.

Many archiving programs do that. Damn annoying.