Best setup for extracting large RAR files

[EnderW]

I have the following setup:

WD 74GB Raptor as my boot drive
4 x WD2500JD RAID5 with LSI MegaRAID SATA 150-4 for storage

If I'm going to be decompressing a large RAR file, would I be better off going from the Raptor to the RAID5 or vice versa? or does it really matter?

and what is the main bottleneck here? CPU speed or HDD speed? what would be the optimal enviroment for such a task?

 

[Vertigo Acid]

Well, I would think that going from the RAID-5 to the raptor would be faster as the RAID-5 is definitly faster in reads than writes.

 

[slowbiznatch]

Test them both using real-world scenarios. I'm interested to see what you come up with.

Edit: Yay for spelling corrections.

 

[EnderW]

Test them both using real-world scenarios. I'm interested to see what you come up with.

good idea

I just ran a few quick tests. There were done with a RAR archive composed of 33 files, each one 50MB in size.

RAID5 > RAID5
6:41

RAID5 > Raptor
0:52

Raptor > RAID5
5:46

Raptor > Raptor
1:12

The results pretty much speak for themselves - the Raptor spanks the RAID5 unmercifully when it comes to writing data. I was going to run the tests on my 7200.8 300GB Seagate as well, but I accidently deleted all the RAR files.

 

[Vertigo Acid]

Yep, those numbers seem spot on.

(I just love it when my predictions come out true in real life situations!)

 

[ZodaEX]

When very light compression is used the bottleneck is all dependent on the hard drive, however set the compression options higher, and you've got a cpu bottleneck. You can test this by looking at how much of your cpu is being used by winrar in task manager.