Are there any performance issues when extracting ZIP/RAR archives from and to the same shared network folder?

Question

Short: Say for example I have a huge RAR file located in a shared folder on the network. If i right-click -> extract that rar file (on same shared folder) will that be terribly slower compared to extracting RAR file on local drive in the Computer?

Long: I have limited SATA ports on my Windows 10 PC and for additional drives that I need attached to it, I'm trying to decide whether to use a NAS (with shared folders), USB 3.0 Enclosure, or go eSata via eSata PCI Expansion card. Esata is obviously the best/fastest but besides that.... for my RAR extract/compress situation....

I was going to go with a NAS to keep my setup as simple as possible without the CPU overhead of a USB connection. But now I'm wondering, since i'll be extracting and compressing lots of large RAR files on this external drive, would it be much slower to do so on a NAS than USB?

Because logically im assuming for my Windows PC to extract a RAR package located on a shared folder on the network (ie. NAS shared folder) it needs to transfer that RAR file (say 5GB rar file) over the network to temp directory, extract that rar file in temp, and them move all that extracted data back to the shared folder - all going through the network. Aint that gonna be painfully slow? Or am I getting this wrong?

Would love to hear your thoughts, thanks

TO ADD: while on the subject, what about playing large video files, what if i want to open/access them from my PC (mp4, avi, etc).. Will the video file need to be transferred to local PC first on the background before it is played in media players?

This NAS thing is starting to look iffy to me for my use case. I guess it's good for backup only and not for "drives in active use"

Answer 1

It depends.

Is your network connection full duplex?

If you have a decent 100Mbps card or a gigabit Ethernet card then chances are the answer to this is "yes". As such it means that over Gigabit (and with a reasonable Gigabit switch that you will be able to get (approximately) 100megabytes per second from the network and 100megabytes per second to the network at the same time.

Can the machine on the other side handle reading and writing this amount of data at the same time?

An SSD would be able to handle this happily, a RAID array might, but a single hard drive probably won't.

Can your computer decompress the data fast enough?

If your computer is slower than 100megabytes per second decompression (unlikely unless it is particularly old) then your computer will be the bottleneck and the above two items are not likely to be your problem.

Are you the only person using his network drive?

Other people reading or writing to the network drive or accessing servers on the machine may cause it to slow down.

People doing similar things (large file copies) on the same network segments as you will cause your connection to be slower.

Answer 2

Short: Besides extracting the files to the same folder being a questionable practice due to the resultant messy file structure, in my experience this will be significantly slower especially given the file sizes involved.

Long:"or go eSata via eSata PCI Expansion card. Esata is obviously the best/fastest but besides that.... for my RAR extract/compress situation...." This would be my first choice given it is a feasible option cost-wise

Answer 3

Videos are surprising low bandwidth by comparison to the numbers we are about talk about. I stream 8gb 1080i files all the time with gigabit are only 10Mbps/second. 4k is about 40-50mb/s with h265 compression, and most software does not copy the file locally.

If you throw enough hardware at it, you can get the extraction speed to be effectively the same.

Your CPU may bottleneck your performance well below the 600mb/s mark depending on the compression,level of compression used, type/speed of main memory.

First you have to decide hdd or ssd and how many.

Most modern hard drives max around 120mb/s read, and at least 20mb/s slower for writing speeds.

• SSD are 500mb-550mb/s via SATA or ESATA version 3
• M.2 SATA = 2000mb/s (as high as 3500) via pci-e

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1. Gigabit 125mb/s common, and minor bottlenecks against hdd.

2. 10 gigabit 1250mb/s hard to find NAS, no bottlenecks

   • USB 3 is 625mb/s( max effective is less)
   • USB 3.1 is 1250mb/s ( max effective is less)

Next you must consider how many disk you want and if your doing Just A Bunch of Disks (JBOD) or some kind of RAID.

If your doing JBOD you max the performance of a single drive.

RAID 0 Stripping = the max speed of all drives as members

Danger Any single drive fails all files are broken.

RAID 5 & 6 Give you about 90% of the read/write speed of all drives. However, they add single(raid 5) or double(raid 6) drive failure protection as the loss of 1 (raid 5) or 2 (raid 6) drives of capacity.

It will take many hard drives to even come close to a single SSD.

USB 3.1 is effectively the same as 10 gigabit, but finding a NAS with either option will be harder and more expensive.

SATA 12g is only available in the enterprise market, and no consumer SSD can utilize it yet. So 1 SSD maxes 1 sata or esata port.

If you go with 1 or more SSD and use 10 gigabit,USB 3(preferably 3.1), or (e)sata your local CPU will probably be the bottleneck.

https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboard-Accessory/HYPER-M-2-X16-CARD/

Just add 4 m.2 ssd, and you will have speeds unheard of with any other hardware.

Here an item from newegg: Note: 3000mb/s each drive. You will max the pci-e x16 bus fully loaded.

ASRock Ultra Quad M.2 Card Review – 4 x M.2 SSD RAID at 10GB/s and 932K IOPS