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I recently got my new computer at the university and it is blazing fast. However when I decompress certain types of files, the computer says I'm decompressing them at over 200MB/s, which is way faster than what my hard drive can be written to (a single standard 7200rpm HD).

whats going on here? Dose it have anything to do with that "intel rapid storage technology" program running in the background? and if so, what exactly is it doing?

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How much RAM have you got in your new computer and what size files and OS? The speed is most likely down to it all happening in RAM before it hits the disk depending on the size of the files and what the app is you are using to decompress.

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  • Computer specs: core i7 860, 6gb 1333mhz ram, 1 TB 7200 rpm HD, windows 7 64-bit. Using 7z to compress and decompress, decompressed files are on the order of 1-2 GB consisting of many files ranging from 3-11MB each, archive is around 50-70MB compressed. Files consist of "data" in the form of .csv files for manual viewing (essentially large text files filled with numbers) and .bin files containing large integer and doubles arrays.
    – Faken
    Mar 2, 2010 at 3:41
  • No wonder you are finding it responsive as that is a nice piece of kit. Sounds like it is all happening in RAM before being shunted off to disk as per Ronald Pottol's answer below.
    – Sim
    Mar 2, 2010 at 4:27
  • Looks like my write cache was turned on, yea it was processing to ram before it dumped it to HD.
    – Faken
    Mar 15, 2010 at 23:45
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Csv should compress very nicely, so if it compresses 4x, then it can be read at 50MBps but decompressed at 200MBps (as it expands 4x), and if it isn't too large, can then be buffered before being written out to disk.

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