Fastest Decompressor?

[inverse]

I usually only use compressors to decompress. I was wonder what's the fastest program out there to decompress them? Obvious answer would be winrar but you never know! Any decompression benchmarks out there? This is for Vista 64-bit.

 

[QuixoticOne]

I don't know of any good benchmarks that would measure what's useful to you.

Usually benchmarks measure the amount of compression, time to compress, and time to decompress a given uncompressed input data set into whatever compressed format they seem give the best compression in.

That's fine if you want to pick the best compression / uncompression program for your input data. But if you're uncompressing existing compressed input data that may be in zip, bzip, rar, tar, gzip, or any number of other archive formats, you have to use a program that's compatible with uncompressing that kind of format.

So even if maybe winrar is faster decompressing rar files and 7-zip is fastest at decompressing 7-zip files, maybe they're both slower than bzip2 at decompressing bzip2 format files. So you can really only even hope to measure what decompressor tends to be decently fast for a given compressed format, but that doesn't say much about whether it's fast, versatile, or even capable of dealing with decompressing other formats.

I'd suggest grabbing 7-zip and see how that works for you; for most decompression cases I doubt you'd see a very substantial performance difference between the best dozen programs that can decompress that format. So if you find a modern decompressor that can handle several of your most commonly handled formats, it's probably not a bad overall choice though sometimes I'm sure for certain particular formats there may be a better choice.

 

[JonnyBlaze]

if i need speed when decompressing something big i do it do another drive.