FreewareGenius.com: The Best Free Compression / ZIP program

[mouser]

Big long piece on freewaregenius.com today, comparing free zip/compression tools.  Quite an impressive amount of work they did comparing the performance of the tools.

We set out to test what we thought to be the best free compression programs in a head-to-head QUANTITATIVE comparison, where we collected actual compression and extraction data on different system. We also took other, qualitative aspects into consideration, such as the features, the appeal of the interface, etc.

One of two tied for first place should be no surprise, it's the well known and powerful "7-zip"; the surprise is the other top place contender, "HaoZip", which is new to me.

http://www.freewareg...rogram-a-comparison/

[TaoPhoenix]

Hmm, it's a little odd that they didn't mention the built in Zip handling of Windows against these programs, if for no other reason than to say "It's slower than ___". I haven't used a dedicated program for Zip handling in years. (Or if they did, I missed in a skim.)

[highend01]

I'm just missing Bandizip (http://www.bandicam.com/bandizip/) in that comparison.

Portable version, can be used in scripts and has a nice progress bar while beeing invoked from cli.

I've did a short speed comparison myself:
Source: 5795 Files, 566 folders, 1,05GB
Source and destination are on the same partition

Compress command lines:
WinRAR.exe a -afzip -r "D:\winrar_Test.zip" "D:\Test\*"
Bandizip32.exe /archive "D:\bandizip_Test.zip" "D:\Test"

Extract command lines:
WinRAR.exe x "D:\winrar_Test.zip" "D:\new_Test\"
Bandizip32.exe /extract "D:\new_Test" "D:\bandizip_Test.zip"

Packer | Extract Time | Compress Time | Compressed Size (MB)
--------------------------------------------------------
Winrar  |        18        |       58           |          870
BandiZ |        18        |       58           |          869

Not bad for a free alternative.