Extracting and Copying at the same time?

[Jiehfeng]

I was wondering if extracting a large file on to the same location/drive, and copying an equally large file to another drive would slow down either the processes or both?

 

[Chipidy]

Yes it would. Extraction and copying are both CPU dependant . Better the CPU, it lessens the processes.

 

[Jiehfeng]

I thought it is also drive dependent? Since both extraction and copying are both using the drive.

 

[migles]

it slows if you are doing the both in the same drive
read and write in an hdd are 2 different processes and the needle has to jump a lot to read or write in the 2 different places the data is located (+the place where the extracted data is being written)
keep in mind, extraction is both reading writing already.

if you are extracting in one drive and are copying files in another drives, in a modern computer it doesn't have any impact in the cpu. (of course as long as you are not running out of ram or something is wrong.)

 

[Jiehfeng]

Alright, so to be clear, here's an example. I'm extracting a file onto the same location of the rar file (). I'm copying another file from drive on to an external drive :X. What would this mean?

 

[FAST6191]

Assuming it is going to the D: drive (some extraction programs will use the windows temp directory) then yes there are likely bottlenecks somewhere and stopping one or the other will most likely speed the remaining one up. There are all sorts of potential variables at play beyond what you have put there (SATA to separate SATA drive, different partitions of the same drive, the later drive letter being a USB, the later drive letter being a network drive, the rar file being essentially uncompressed or just lightly compressed...) that could shift where the bottleneck is at. Some would have to be engineered to be that but others would be normal enough -- there have been uncompressed iso files stuck in Rar by scene groups, and you could be sticking one on a USB drive which tends to be a CPU bound process (as opposed to DMA or something else for other drive types).

You can test all this though as both extraction programs and copy programs have a pause option, or you can get a program that does have such a thing. Alternatively once things settle down speed wise then start another and watch/time the rate counters.