File Archive Test
In this day and age, users collect a large amount of data on their computers. Audio files, photographs and music can eat up space. Backing up this data is something that a lot of us should do. This is also a good test of the file system as well as the performance of the processor in compacting the data into an archive.
This test was done using the RAR 3.51 archiving program as it exists for both Windows XP and Mac OS X and can be run from a command line avoiding the graphical interface. The RAR application is not a Universal Application and runs under the Rosetta emulation.
Test Steps
- Open terminal or command window
- Use the RAR command to select and compress 3.5GB of data into a single archive file
- Time process until completion
Results
- Mac OS X – 63m 57s
- Windows XP – 48m 13s
Based on the results here, the process under the Windows operating system is roughly 25% faster than the same task under Mac OS X. While the rar application does run under Rosetta, the performance drop off from this is likely much smaller than the difference in the file systems. After all, the previous file performance test showed a similar 25% performance difference when just writing data to the drive.
