Versions??

[Kamel]

7-zip dominates in sheer features, price, and formats it carries. others are good for other things though. one which has died some but was good was winace... it used to do some voodoo compressing that was the best, but 7zip has definitely dominated if using the correct settings as far as compressibility is concerned.

[Shades]

You can use 7-zip in scripts (a big advantage to me). While the GUI gives you access to a lot of compression settings, I find that using the command line version is more effective.

For example: I normally have to pack a set of executables and dll's (about 250Mb). Using the GUI version results in an archive file of 21Mb (ultimate compression level). But with the command line version the result is an archive file of 17Mb (ultimate compression level).

I really like 7-zip.

[IainB]

@Deozaan: A rather belated response/post to this subject. After having left this subject alone for a while, I recalled your suggestion and have had time to install 7-Zip and play with it a bit. (This is under Windows7 (64-bit).
It seems rather good and very fast. I'm not sure whether I would prefer it over WinRAR.

[Shades]

WinRAR has the better interface, but I use mainly the context menu to create and unpack archives, so that whole interface thing is rendered moot to me. As 7-zip has a better compression ratio (using the 'ultra' settings) which requires only slightly more time to create than a WinRAR archive (using 'best' settings), my personal preference goes out to 7-zip.

[fenixproductions]

I wonder did anyone take a look at:
http://www.maximumco...ssion.com/index.html

I find it to be the best archivers/compression comparison page (although some may not be mentioned).

[IainB]

@Shades:
You may well be right in that WinRAR may have the "better" interface (e.g., You can browse and manage archives quite easily with it, and it seems quite intuitive), but this would depend on the subjective judgement from the personal (user) perception.
However, on your other point, it seems to me that the differential between the "absolute best" compression ratios and/or processing times between compression products might not be all that significant nowadays, given technology/efficiency advances, including, for example:

• adding hundreds of Gigabytes of extra disk storage comes at virtually little or no extra marginal cost;
• hard drive (disk) access times (read/write) are continually being increased;
• CPU cycle frequencies (speed or cycles per second) - in serial and/or parallel processing schemes - seem to be continuing to go up at an impressive rate with each new CPU brought out by the chipmakers - again at little or no extra marginal cost;
• the move to 64-bit technology and associated higher bandwidth bus sizes contributing to increased throughput and reduced access/fetch times in RAM/CPUs;
• RAM cycle frequencies (speed) continuing to increase;

@fenixproductions:
Thankyou for the link to http://www.maximumcompression.com
Good knowledge content!    

To add to that link, there are a couple of general and related links which were provided by others in the discussion thread above, which I repeat below for our convenience and to put them together here with your link. They too have good knowledge content:
Wikipedia - Comparison of file managers
Wikipedia -Comparison of file archivers

[Shades]

@IainB:
With better interface I meant that WinRAR's interface is more functional when compared with the 7-zip one, there is a lot of functionality is not working when clicking on it.

In another thread here at the DoCo forum one of my posts mention that I regularly need to pull database dumps with a size of several hundreds of gigabytes through a limited internet connection. Well, for these parts of the world the connection is a rather good one, but pales in comparison with the connections available in the northern hemisphere. Unfortunately the amount of money spent on my connection is similar or higher to the prices charged over there.

The point I want to get across is that for me compression ratios matter because of the internet connection. You are right when working on your own system/LAN, because of the technical advances you accurately described.   

[IainB]

@Shades:

"With better interface I meant that WinRAR's interface is more functional when compared with the 7-zip one, there is a lot of functionality is not working when clicking on it."

Really? I hadn't noticed that some of the functionality didn't work. Thanks for pointing that out.

Thanks also for explaining to me your need for max compression ratios and max performance for your humungous archives. Where on the planet are you? I recall when I used to work in SE Asia I had to put up with some awful telecomms infrastructures, and would often have to use a 56K dial-up link with an actual bandwidth of about 30K. That's when I started getting interested in using ZIP files - emailing out only ZIPped attachments and asking people to only email me ZIPped attachments.

Having just done some comparison between standard ZIP compression by the Win7 OS, and 7-zip, and then the 7z compression by 7-zip - I observed that there was a significantly better compression ratio in the 7z files. Now I understand why you might want to use it and why you are interested in processing speeds for those files.

When I compress document files/folders, I would only use the standard ZIP, as I need my disk-based archives to be able to be indexed/searched by the Win7 OS and by Google Desktop and it gets tricky or impossible with less standard compression methods. However, I still need to have something to help me to uncompress the various non-ZIP archives I come across. 7-zip looks OK for that purpose, so far.