Test System And Methodology

To reduce the effect of the hard drive read-write delays on the results, the test files were placed on one hard drive and compression performed on the second hard drive. A special partition was created on both drives to ensure that only the outermost tracks are used for the tests.

A Seiko WO73-4000 stopwatch was used to time all compression test runs, even if the compression software comes with its own timer. It starts from the moment the compression job begins and ends when the compressed file is fully written to the destination partition.

Test Settings

In this comparison guide, we are going to run three different kinds of tests :

• Fastest compression
• Default compression
• Best compression

The test results will help you decide which data compressor is best for you. Some people may prefer very quick compression while others may prefer to wait for the smallest file size possible. And there may be those who prefer to leave it at the default setting. Okay, maybe they just don't know better.

The Results