[Socrates]

THIS COMMENT REALLY CUTS BETWEEN AN ALPHA COMMENT AND A MORE GENERAL COMMENT ABOUT FORMATS . . .

1) I fear my last message was unclear . . . or perhaps I misunderstand what the RAR Support option in PA does . . . I was wondering if (a) I owned WINRAR, and (b) had installed beta 5, and (c) had set the RAR support option in PA (even in 2012), if PA would use the WINRAR Beta, and thus be able to open WinRAR 5 archives.

2) It appears the WinRAR 5 engine is very impressive. I did a quick comparison test. Using PA from the shell, I compressed an entire folder (mostly PDFs and docx files). zipx (highest compression) took 13 sec. 7z took 12 sec.; and RAR5 took 6 seconds! The 7Z and RAR archives were the same size; the zipx was slightly larger.

I thought that perhaps one relevant difference might have been that the two PA tests were done from within the shell while the RAR was created within the RAR window.

Maybe that is the difference. But in trying to make a more adequate comparison, I tried to create the archives from within the open PA window; unfortunately, I had some trouble figuring out how to compress an entire folder, at least with a simple click or two.

Given the results of this admittedly one-off test, it seems like the RAR5 format blew the field away (although another relevant issue is the time it takes to decompress said archives — and that I didn't test).

Finally, I added compress to RAR to my shell, and did the same test. That took 9 seconds.

This makes me think that I should continue to use PA because of its ability to work with some many archives, but start to use the new RAR 5 format as my default.

Or is this single test an aberration?

BTW, having set the default RAR format (within WinRAR) to RAR 5, PA's "compress to RAR option" in the shell formed the archive in 8 seconds.