Winzip, WinRar or 7zip

When you want to compress your files and folders, are you still using plain windows zip utility? Or already move to more exotic paid program like WinRar? Or you actually already join free and open source community, using 7zip? For this very own purpose, I made a short complete test. (You can do yours to compare with your fav. compressor like PowerArchiever, WinAce etc)

Here is the original folder, consist of 1370 files and 126 folder. Folder size 79.6 MB but will cost me 84 MB on my hdd (4kb cluster NTFS).

For those who are interested to know what folder it is, it is 4th planet patch folder for Rose Online game. You can get it from net.

OK, now let compress it using windows compression utility (Via right click on that folder –> Send To –> Compress Folder). Default format for this kind of compression is zip.

As you might see, Windows zip compressor, compress 79.6 MB files into 35.3 MB. Not to shabby huh. More than half.

Now, let move on to all time exotic compressor, named winrar. Let see if it still able to amuse us with its magic (Winrar is not a free software. You may download it from the rarlab with 30 days trial period. After that, it will keep showing the nag screen until you purchase the software, unless you crack it :D)

Yay, WinRar able to shrink the files better. 32.3 MB vs 35.3 MB (3 MB smaller than normal windows pre-installed zip compressor.). So is it worth to spend some money to get this software? Hold on until you see what 7zip can do.

7zip is not zip. 7zip able to support rar and zip, it is not zip format. 7zip is a free and open source (this is the best part, nothing to hide, they even could provide you the whole source code if you need), no nagging screen, uber small size and under opensourge umbrella. Enough with this blubbering, let see the result.

Holly Cow… 13.9 MB only. Do you believe that. 43% of what winrar could do (in term of size).

So, lets recap :

Non Compress    : 79.6 MB

Zip (Free)            : 35.3 MB

WinRar (Paid)       : 32.3 MB

7zip (Free + OS)  : 13.9 MB

So, from almost 80 MB, 7zip able to compress the whole folder to merely 14 MB. That is quite an achievement. I am pretty surprise with this result honestly. I don’t expect 7zip to beat winrar this bad actually. I expect that 7zip able to compress the folder around 20% better than winrar, but fact is fact. 7zip just blow them away.

So..where can i download this 7zip utility ?

Here : http://www.7-zip.org/download.html