Hard Drive and Unzipping takes too long? Help pls.

[cableguy22]

Ok, I have 1 hard drive sitting on 1 cable 60GB IBM 7200 RPM, ATA100. 2 partitions. Fat32, DMA is enabled.

I have about 60 files zipped with music (950MB total) and I started unzipping them all and it took 4 hours and 15 minuties to unzip all of them with winrar. Is it normal or there is something wrong with my hard drive? need help

 

[camieabz]

It may be your memory is getting choked with the unzipping.

Get system monitor running and try again.

How much memory have you? I've found my system slows down sometimes with heavy use of Winzip.

<b><font color=blue>~ BIOS SETTINGS: Fast, Hot, Unstable...That ought to work. ~</font color=blue></b>

 

[cableguy22]

hm...

here are my specs
ABIT AT7 mobo
2100 XP
Kingston 512MB DDR 2700

 

[camieabz]

Did system monitor show any info on memory usage as you tried to unzip the files?

<b><font color=blue>~ BIOS SETTINGS: Fast, Hot, Unstable...That ought to work. ~</font color=blue></b>

 

[Javic]

One of my machines is a PIII 600MHz and I've noticed that winrar is a BIG CPU hog on it. Extractions take forever. The memory never really increases that much but my CPU will max out. Just something else to check.

 

[camieabz]

Fair enough, but this guy's CPU has a fair bit of kick. My CPU is about half as good, and doesn't drop out that badly on Winzip stuff. Only if I've spent a good half hour or so messing around. Usually a restart sorts it, which suggests memory.

<b><font color=blue>~ BIOS SETTINGS: Fast, Hot, Unstable...That ought to work. ~</font color=blue></b>

 

[cableguy22]

i was checking in the task manager performance and cpu usage was averaging at 70%, the memory stayed the same 159MB out of 512... Also when I tried to unzip on my RAID 1 drives unzipping time decreased by 45 minuties, but still it's 3.5 hours for unziping 60 files totaling 950MB...

 

[lhgpoobaa]

is UDMA properly enabled? that would make things crawl.

Asteroid 2002 NV7: The <b>REAL</b> solution to the Israel/Palistine problem!

 

[cableguy22]

here is the result of the test

www.dkuniverse.com/testhd.gif

 

[Javic]

You actually might want to ensure that your disks are defrag'd too. I can definately see if your drives have high fragmentation that it would take longer for the extraction process, because it has to jump around the disk to write the new data.