Native unpacking of RAR and 7z archives in Windows 11 turned out to be several times slower than WinRAR
Miscellaneous / / August 28, 2023
The new tool adequately copes only with TAR, and slows down with more popular formats.
Microsoft is preparing the Windows 11 23H2 update, which will add long-awaited feature: native support for RAR and 7z archives. Users will no longer need third-party programs to unpack such archives. The update will become publicly available in the fall, but you can try out the unpacking in the beta right now. This is what the editors of the Neowin portal did, comparing unpacking speed through Explorer, WinRAR and NanaZIP.
For testing, 24 GB files were archived in RAR, 7z and TAR, after which all three programs were used on two different builds: desktop PC with Ryzen 5 @ 4 GHz and 32 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM and laptop with Core i3 @ 2 GHz and 16 GB of the same memory.
Here are the results for a more powerful build with Ryzen:
And this is for a laptop with Core i3:
In both cases, Explorer is significantly inferior to specialized programs in decompressing RAR and 7z, offering comparable results only in the case of TAR archives. Worst of all things are with 7z: where other programs cope in a minute and a half, "Explorer" needs more than eight minutes.
In addition to a longer unpacking, the authors note a couple of drawbacks. So, the "Explorer" does not have a normal display of the decryption progress, so the remaining time will have to be guessed. It is also unable to open password-protected archives, and still can only pack in ZIP.
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