

The first and the second one are free, the latter is not and its developer is the owner (the program that manages this format is WinRar ).
#Winrar vs 7zip zip
Zipper, Rar, GZip, BZip2, 7z, Tar, Tar.gz …Īmong the most popular on Windows we have: 7z, Zip and Rar. There are many algorithms and therefore compression formats: To share RAR5 files it’s best to wait until the format gets a bit more popular, or create a self-extracting file.Often we don’t even pay attention to it, but when we click on a ‘ zipper ’ file, we are us ing sophisticated compression algorithms that over the years keep getting better and better. Right now, for compatibility reasons, our recommendation is to use RAR4, which WinRAR offers by default. In the case of 7-Zip, Igor Pavlov, the lead developer, has said that adding support for RAR5 “isn’t a priority”. Whether other decompressors will open RAR5 files depends on how fast they adopt the new standard.

On the same page the RAR5 format specifications are available.
#Winrar vs 7zip rar
We tested several of the most popular decompressors, such as 7-Zip and IZArc, and we haven’t managed to open RAR5 files.Īlthough RAR isn’t an open source format, WinRAR distributes the source code of the UnRAR utility, which is free and only for command lines. Why can’t I unzip RAR5?įiles compressed with the algorithm RAR5 are still very new and, can only be opened by WinRAR 5. The default dictionary size is 32 megabytes. To do this you have to choose the option RAR5 to compress a new file from WinRAR 5.0. The results of compression, which can be tentatively drawn from the sample used, show some advantage to using RAR over 7-Zip, but they’re not very significant. But even using eight multithreaded cores couldn’t beat RAR4. In the case of LZMA, which is the algorithm 7-Zip uses by default, the CPU is hardly used, whereas LZMA2 doesn’t have this limitation. Bear in mind that the normal RAR5 level uses 32MB dictionaries, which increased compression times considerably.ħ-Zip results weren’t great. Starting with the obvious: RAR algorithm speed is impressive both in RAR4 and RAR5. The only thing that changed was the size of the dictionaries to match, as far as possible, those used by RAR5 (apart from RAR4, which was limited to 4mb).

Three default options were used: fastest, most powerful and normal. Source and destination were the same ATA hard drive. The file contained 104 different file types (documents, videos, images and uncompressed music) in ten folders, occupying a total area of 528.031.744 bytes in the NTFS partition.
#Winrar vs 7zip pro
The machine used was a Dell Precision Workstation 490 with CPU Intel Xeon 5130 (dual-processor quad-core), 16GB of RAM and Windows 8 Pro 64bit. We did a quick test comparing RAR5, RAR4 and 7-Zip (LZMA and LZMA2). For example, in a test published in Hyperspin, WinRAR 5 decompressed a 5GB image in two minutes compared to almost six minutes for 7-Zip. In several tests, RAR5 has outperformed 7-Zip in terms of speed and compression ratio. government uses it to protect its Top Secret content. It’s certainly not the strongest encryption on the market, but it is very, very robust. RAR5 format is much more resistant to damage than RAR4, but only with a log size equal or greater than 5% of the file, even if it’s corrupted.įinally, with RAR5 you can encrypt your data with a 256-bit AES algorithm. So when would you need to use large dictionary sizes? When you have huge files that you aren’t going to share, such as when you make a back up.Īnother important change is the new recovery log. The default size of the RAR compression dictionary is 32MB, a much lower figure. The larger the dictionary, which stores the repeatable parts of a file, the better the compression, but only for huge files. For starters, RAR5 increases the compression dictionary size to 1GB (in the 64-bit version).
