That's pretty innacurate though. When extracting/compressing there's both reading and writing happening at te same time with shifts back and forward on the disk platters. That's a big part of why its so slow. Extracting to RAM proves this. Extracting even a 50 meg file is painfully slow, let alone things like isos. Yes cpu makes a difference, but harddrive speeds are a bottleneck.
I dunno about this. Seek times will always be a bit of an issue, but transfer speeds aren't that big a deal. Last night I was extracting some lha files from one partition to another on my 030/50 A1200. The hard drive LED spent more time off than on, showing a short burst of flickering followed by a longer idle time. This points at the number crunching throughput rather than drive speed. I think though that compression level could swing that dramatically the other way - those archives used high compression, I'd imagine you could be stuck for IDE throughput with an archive that uses low or no compression...
