The Anobyte Opinion
By Robert Yorke
WinRAR is an easy-to-use archive manager, useful for compressing files to make them smaller, or simply for packing many files into one, easy to handle file. It is a GUI-based application, so no fiddling around on the command line is necessary, and there is also an option to ‘integrate into the shell’, whereby the user has WinRAR archiving/expanding options in the menu from right-clicking on a file.
For creating archives WinRAR only handles two different file types; the very common and well known ZIP file, and the probably less well known, but better (in terms of compression) RAR format. With both of these archive formats the user can choose varying degrees of compression, ranging from ‘fastest’ (least compression), though ‘fast’, ‘normal’, and ‘good’ to ‘best’ (most compression, but slowest). There is a sixth extremely fast option called ‘store’ where an uncompressed archive is created. With this type of archive no space is saved, but all of the files are stored as one file. Other options common to both ZIP and RAR formats are password encryption, and the creation of self-extracting archives (so that the end recipient does not need any decompression tools themselves). There are a few very useful options available only with the RAR format; amongst which is a very useful utility called ‘volume splitting’. Volume splitting allows a very large archive to be broken into smaller chunks of, for example, 700MB for storage on CDs.
When it comes to decompressing archives WinRAR seems to cope with almost anything you can throw at it. During the installation of WinRAR you are given the option to associate a plethora of different archive formats with the application. I could bet most users wouldn’t ever need many of these, but it’s good to know you’ve got most bases covered. As a user of several different operating systems it is easy handling files from other operating systems using WinRAR.
Speed and compression tests.
To give an idea of how well WinRAR compresses I have run two distinct archiving tests. The first test, being 5MB of plain text (specifically the complete works of Shakespeare), should respond well to compression. The second test, 5MB of audio files, may be more difficult to compress. Using WinRAR, both sets of files were archived several times, with differing options; both ZIP and RAR files were made, each with the speed settings ‘normal’, ‘best’, ‘fastest’ and ‘store’ in turn.
Compression |
Text (Shakespeare) |
Binary files (audio) |
|---|---|---|
| ZIP normal | 2.00MB (60% compression) | 3.67MB (27% compression) |
| ZIP best | 1.99MB (60% compression) | 3.67MB (27% compression) |
| ZIP fastest | 2.32MB (54% compression) | 3.68MB (27% compression) |
| ZIP store | 5.04MB (no compression) | 5.04MB (no compression) |
| RAR normal | 1.91MB (62% compression) | 2.49MB (50% compression) |
| RAR best | 1.46MB (71% compression) | 2.49MB (50% compression) |
| RAR fastest | 2.25MB (55% compression) | 3.60MB (28% compression) |
| RAR store | 5.04MB (no compression) | 5.04MB (no compression) |
It is clear that text files can be more compressed than binary files. It is also clear that the RAR format manages more compression than the ZIP format, particularly on the ‘normal’ or higher compression settings. Notice that with the audio files the RAR format on ‘fastest’ setting achieves more compression than the ZIP format on its ‘best’ setting.
With the compression rate tests the time taken was only just big enough to measure (2 seconds in the worst case), so another test was necessary to measure the speed of WinRAR. For this the same eight compression methods were tried on 1.2GB of audio files. The results follow:
Compression |
Binary files (audio) |
Time Taken (mins:secs) |
|---|---|---|
| ZIP normal | 1.10GB (8% compression) | 5:35 |
| ZIP best | 1.10GB (8% compression) | 7:19 |
| ZIP fastest | 1.10GB (8% compression) | 4:40 |
| ZIP store | 1.20GB (no compression) | 0:50 |
| RAR normal | 822MB (25% compression) | 6:17 |
| RAR best | 822MB (25% compression) | 7:08 |
| RAR fastest | 1.10GB (8% compression) | 4:04 |
| RAR store | 1.20GB (no compression) | 0:50 |
All tests performed on a AMD Athlon 64 3200Mhz system with 7200rpm drives.
Here it is shown that RAR compression is slower than ZIP compression for ‘normal’ and ‘best’ settings, but much more compression is achieved. With RAR archiving on its ‘fastest’ setting the performance is the same as a ZIP format, but a little quicker. For the extra time taken between ‘normal’ and ‘best’ with the RAR format no extra compression benefit was gained, despite the extra time taken.
Conclusions.
When it comes to ease of use, WinRAR is very simple, and completely intuitive. There are help buttons to assist you, but I didn't notice them at first, having no need for them. WinRAR can cope with almost all archive formats when it comes to decompression, but only compresses/archives in two; ZIP and RAR. Out of these RAR offers the best compression rates, but is a little slower in doing so than the very popular ZIP format.
Second Opinion
By Gregor Stirling
While agreeing fully with Bob’s observations, I’d also like to point out just how incredibly comprehensive WinRAR is by adding that, there’s an amazing set of cool themes available from here just in case you want to change the look of WinRAR.
WinRAR’s a great tool, it’s the one we use and we have no hesitation in recommending it!
