A cabinet can also span disks. A folder is a contiguous block of compressed data within a cabinet or cabinet set. Files in a cabinet archive can be compressed across their file boundaries as a single compression block. Compression ratios improve significantly when files are compressed together as opposed to individually. However, there's a trade-off between random access time to an individual file and compression ratio since an entire folder must be decompressHuffed to extract an item from it.
Folders can span cabinets.
A file is an individual item in a cabinet. Files can span folders. Within a cabinet archive file, any combination of these techniques may be used. MSZip is essentially the same as the deflation compression method used by PKZip. LZX is an LZ77-based compression technique that uses static Huffman encoding.