Which is faster: multiple .rar files torrent or a single .iso ?

[6frcsa]

I'd like to know if I rar an ISO into multiple files, will I upload faster than if I seed a large .iso file ?

I believe there will be no difference as the .iso is hashed anyway into pieces but someone on another forum wrote that multiple rar files will be seeded faster than one .iso.

thanks!

[boo]

to rar it to several pieces is unnecessary, one rar file is enough.

.iso files (or at least .bin files) becomes allot smaller if you rar them.

[Ultima]

@Remouald: Complete and utter bull. File formats and number of files do NOT affect the speed at which the torrent transfers.

@boo: You can't really say with that much certainty how well disc images can be compressed, as it depends on the contents themselves. If there is a lot of repeat data, then sure, it'll compress down very well. If all the data is very different, and there is little-to-no repeats/patterns, compression isn't going to be very good, regardless of whether it's .iso or .bin or whatever else.

[boo]

ultima, when you compress a .iso, winrar doesn't see the content, it's just data.

For winrar, a .iso is like a huge .txt, easy to compress.

I often compress .iso and .bin files which I know I wont be using for a while and

so far all of them have succesfully compressed allot.

[Ultima]

Yah, but data on disc images aren't exactly obscured, so the files in the image are *still* files, just concatenated together in a specific format. And even *if* you couldn't distinguish separate files, repeat data still occurs very often Disc images can get compressed well often because of redundant overhead for storing files in the disc in a specific file format (which causes redundancy in header information and such), or maybe there are a bunch of RAW AVI/WAV/TXT/BMP (read: uncompressed) files on the image. Or maybe there is a combination of both (specific container file with header information, but contains uncompressed files in it). In any of these cases, the files can get compressed down nicely.

But you still can't say with any absolute certainty that compressing will make the files smaller. Running off-topic on such an insignificant point, though, so I'll shut up now

[splintax]

WinRAR and all other compressors/archivers (to my knowledge) always look at the raw data. It's not like WinRAR says "hey look, this file has a .mp3 extension, I'm not going to compress it".

Like Ultima said, it depends on the amount of data that's repeated. Make an ISO of a 700MB text file containing "abcdefg.." over and over again, and make an ISO of a 700MB XviD rip. You'll find that one is compressed a lot, and one doesn't really compress at all.