Who needs diskspace?
As I have said in other posts I am working on cleaning up some of the stuff I have aquired over the years to try to reduce the amount of files all over the place. As I was going through some of the things I have downloaded recently I accidentally compressed a file with 7-zip, which I loved but did not use very often. Well, I wish I had started using it a long time ago. The file size difference between that and the zip was huge, almost 40% of the size of the zip. So I started to play around with different combinations to save disk space where I can and found out a few things about 7-zip compression. If you 7zip a file that has been compressed with started zip file format it will not change it nearly as much as if you compress the uncompressed data with 7zip alone. I was thinking it might work similar to tar/gz where there some still some room to compress, but I was wrong. I also found out that it really depends on what the files you are compressing are. I compressed an application with 7zip, zip, and RAR and RAR was less than 7zip, but in most cases 7zip will be less than RAR. Fonts compress very nicely, I have done a brief comparison of the different formats I used when compressing my font folders today.
| Files | Uncompressed | Zip (Best) | RAR (Solid) | 7-Zip (Solid) | |
| # A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Total |
350 3283 3290 3465 2106 1345 4039 1946 1284 1145 709 1130 1528 2465 1224 746 2002 414 1399 3528 1732 1425 700 1133 175 140 337 |
19,432,602 216,484,975 209,743,222 197,171,968 161,382,739 70,762,732 265,507,208 118,626,280 92,442,518 61,676,679 44,778,045 129,222,383 82,862,378 183,906,013 60,860,551 40,200,527 123,579,802 17,462,026 79,730,775 204,664,781 99,318,069 77,367,299 42,937,444 79,448,192 7,828,896 9,895,136 16,740,196 |
8,266,657 124,182,176 113,086,542 109,506,439 83,751,223 37,499,813 143,018,980 65,021,200 58,793,977 32,468,093 24,056,367 90,390,630 43,841,368 106,765,554 34,373,041 21,276,717 67,317,279 9,640,070 42,204,393 109,489,137 53,005,265 44,873,722 23,263,838 45,691,024 4,233,690 3,744,365 9,380,627 |
6,665,086 91,576,361 88,354,641 85,554,465 64,749,847 28,031,785 109,335,999 50,531,661 50,155,143 24,873,645 18,986,924 66,552,567 32,768,547 71,985,343 25,229,258 16,669,012 54,556,619 7,467,467 32,423,370 86,734,165 38,282,557 29,310,944 18,130,555 29,539,937 3,411,897 3,085,698 7,491,640 |
6,143,253 82,798,899 79,698,004 76,878,821 59,199,124 25,288,581 98,751,764 45,591,436 46,125,288 22,391,786 17,119,776 60,488,657 29,567,972 64,405,551 22,748,170 14,856,676 49,284,056 6,717,650 29,229,343 78,564,544 34,444,039 26,124,593 16,457,670 26,430,365 3,094,653 2,790,443 6,752,495 |
| Files | Uncompressed | Zip (Best) | RAR (Solid) | 7-Zip (Solid) | |
| 43040 | 2,714,033,436 | 1,509,142,187 | 1,142,455,133 | 1,031,943,609 |
As you can see there is a 455mb difference between the ZIP and 7-Zip file formats. Since ZIP files cannot be compressed as solid archives I also gave a comparison of RAR solid which turned out to be 105mb more than 7-Zip. 455mb is nothing to sneeze at, even with these 500gb and 750gb drives available if you download like I do you will fill them up as soon as you get them clean and an additional 455mb of space is worth the extra time it takes to compress the files.
With that said I highly recommend exanding your free space by compressing with 7-zip. I have used a lot of well-known and hard to find compression tools and this one is number one on my list for your everyday compression needs.
* These tests were performed on my primary desktop
