Conclusion
We looked at four different file archiving solutions and had them compress 650MB of mixed test data. In our first run, we had the programs use their own compression solutions, namely 7z with LZMA2 for 7-Zip, ARC for FreeArc, RAR for WinRAR, and ZIP for WinZip. In a second run, we compared the results using the popular ZIP format, which we believe is most relevant for a majority of users.
Proprietary Formats
The results are pretty interesting. There are severe differences in processing time and significant discrepancies in resulting archive file sizes. At the top of our list: ARC and LZMA/2 deliver the highest compression ratio across our test data when best compression is selected. Unfortunately, ARC and LZMA also take quite a while. If you want really high compression at acceptable processing times, LZMA2 via 7-Zip is best.
ZIP Format
Using ZIP, the resulting archive file sizes did not differ significantly. 7-Zip and WinZip provided the highest compression ratios at best settings. However, the processing time for both was woefully long.
Winners?
If you can freely choose an archiving tool, and if you want to balance compression and processing time, 7-Zip with LZMA2 and WinRAR—both at default compression—deliver the best overall results. For those of you depending on the ZIP format, you’ll want to go with 7-Zip or WinRAR as well, again at default compression. At the best compression setting, you probably aren't going to worry much about processing time anymore. As a result, we don’t recommend any title in particular.
WinRAR and WinZip remain the usability winners. Their feature sets (particularly WinZip’s) are unmatched and provide best experience for less technical users. WinZip offers maximum features, and WinRAR offers a wizard to assist. Enthusiasts and fans of the command line will want to go with 7-Zip and FreeArc.
Losers?
We tried to create a test environment that includes various file types, but it should be possible to squeeze out slightly better results with some of these archiving programs.
However, from a performance standpoint, we can only shake our heads at WinZip’s persistently missing support for threaded operation. It is the only tool here that still only runs on a single processing core at a time when six-core CPUs are becoming available.
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Aw no you didn't test PK-ZIP!!
I have used 7-Zip for a while, hats of to the Developers
Bloody hell! PK-zip! not used that in over 10 years!
Great article. Always used WinRAR and never really took 7-Zip seriously, but may now!
Can't remember why I started using 7zip, but I certainly won't be changing any time soon!
Thanks for a nice article. One potentially important aspect of archiving does not seem to be mentioned, and it would be really useful to see it considered. This is the archive format: solid or non-solid.
By default 7-Zip uses solid compression, which gives it an advantage in compression ratios, particularly when compressing lots of relatively small files. Conversely, WinRAR use non-solid compression by default, which provides a significant performance advantage if you want access specific files within the archive rather than only extracting the complete archive.
Would it be possible to use GPU's for this kind of task?
In terms of which compression program I use, I prefer WinRAR. I often work with huge video files and a limited amount of disk space, so what I do is RAR the files to a smaller size (some compress really well), so that they can be batch processed them at a later date (transcoded from uncompressed AVI to Divx). I find WinRAR fast and flexible; it's cool being able to alter the priority and compression profile on-the-fly.
As a Linux user I use the default compression tool which happens to be 7-Zip.
So 7zip is the best? we already knew that! why did you even bother with winzip? were not running 98SE here, .zip file functionality has been native to windows for almost a decade making winzip about as useful as the pkzip.exe it replaced
I've been using winrar since early 90s. It was always much better than zip though arc was nice for executables. Never bothered to look for others. But 7zip really impressed since the difference in compression is marginal whether best compression or default is used while time compressing is very impressive. Its important though to test that theory about using solid archives. I've always avoid solid archives because they're harder to recover from errors and you can't access individual files.
What about windows built in zip folder thingy
7zip is really good, but i use IZArc (yeah, i kno, uve never heard of it) simply because its tiny and ive never had a file type it couldnt open. People are always sending me weird file types. We should have a file compatability test for the 4 compression programs just tested, see if they actually are useful at opening different compressed files.