PAR2 and WinRAR performance

[imported_latuszek]

I often use quickpar on par2 sets and winrar on huge rar archives. What would be my best bet to improve the performance of these tasks? Are they mostly CPU bound or hard-disk bound? I currently am running a intel pentium 805 not overclocked(mobo sucks) with a 300gb maxtor sata hard drive. What should be the first thing I upgrade?

BTW I've tried a comparison of unraring the same archive on the maxtor drive and then on a 74gb raptor, and most of the time it's just barely faster on the raptor 74gb -- so is the cpu the issue?

Thanks

 

[wanderer27]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Rar is more CPU intensive than HD.

A lot of number crunching going on there, so yeah, a faster HD may save a little time on the read/write to disk, but the main factor is going to be in the processing.

 

[CalvinHobbes]

I have an 805 in my main system and running PAR2 or WinRAR don't seem slow to me. When I extract RAR, I extract to another drive so that may be the difference.

 

[Double Trouble]

Depends on what you're doing. The actual uncompressing / decoding work is done by the CPU. However, it's writing the data to file while that's going on, and if you're dealing with large files (for exampe, you're using par to fix a set of DVD rar files you downloaded), the hard drive could be the bottleneck. In that scnenario you should see a benefit from a faster drive or multiple drives.

 

[docinthebox]

Some or all of these apps are multithreaded. So here's where a dual-core CPU would come in real handy.

Another factor worth looking into is your IDE or SATA driver. Be sure to update to the latest version as buggy drivers can cause more blocking than necessary and increase latency on each disk read/write, causing the CPU to wait just because of blocking.