Avoiding a temp directories is usually a good thing, unless the temp directory allows you to avoid operations on removable drives. I've noticed on windows with

Avoiding a temp directories is usually a good thing, unless the temp directory allows you to avoid operations on removable drives. I've noticed on windows with drives marked as "removable" it's almost always faster to copy an archive to the harddrive (non-removable drive) extract it and copy the contents back. I'm assuming this is because of the different or lack of caching available for removable drives. Random read/write is typically a lot slower that sequential read/write so an ideal solution would take into account the relative performance of different drives before with making or not making a temp folder.