Thanx all for your suggestions,
i dont really want to use any more memory than needed because the main pak file will be very large, at the moment it is 40mb+ this will contain textures, models, actors, world data, and other data files.

Is there any point of keeping the data stored in memory or would it be more memory friendly to just load the data straight from the pak stream?

If i keep the PChar data how will i be able to load it in to a structure?

thanx