Checking the version of your game assets...

posted on September 2nd, 2010, 3:51 pm

i've seen many hard drives with extreme fragmentation. and computers dont NEED conitguous data, they dont NEED consecutive data either. the computer will function with fragmentation, but just slower.

your maths is purely theoretical.

fo has over 8000 odfs. if these are placed non consecutively and the files themselves are fragmented then its a lot of work. you could gain over 10 seconds easily in this case by defragging and optimising. also if u could write a script for mydefrag to move fo's files to the start of your hd you could get even more boost. as harddrives are faster near the start.

posted on September 2nd, 2010, 4:45 pm

running defrag every day is pointless, and it will actually reduce the life time of your hard drive.

and defragging definitely will improve all performance of your computer. especially checking the odfs. if they get fragmented then the hard drive will have to spend a lot of time finding the files.

making the odfs be all in the same place on the disk and all contiguous will decrease the time it takes to check the files.

new patches have more odfs so the check takes longer.

My diskdefrag is set to defrag every day but its set at a time when im on only once at that time in a week so its more like once a week and there is a slight point to that, and no altho it will decrease the lifetime of my hd if i did do it everyday it wouldnt have such a significant impact that id actually care.

No it wont make that much of a difference it would improve speed by about 2% so unless your pc is of very low spec then that wont make a difference, only really worth this if fragmentation is above 50%.

edit: i just got my hd to 51% fragmentation and tested the time it took to check assets, time was still between 1-2 mins as before, so no significant difference.

posted on September 2nd, 2010, 7:16 pm

i've seen many hard drives with extreme fragmentation. and computers dont NEED conitguous data, they dont NEED consecutive data either. the computer will function with fragmentation, but just slower.

your maths is purely theoretical.

fo has over 8000 odfs. if these are placed non consecutively and the files themselves are fragmented then its a lot of work. you could gain over 10 seconds easily in this case by defragging and optimising. also if u could write a script for mydefrag to move fo's files to the start of your hd you could get even more boost. as harddrives are faster near the start.

Fragmentation does not hinder a computer unless the data it has to read is fragmented, if it so happens the programs running while FO is checksumming those odfs rely on fragmented data then that may slow the computer down, but as Nuke said, the difference is very little.

Yes my math is theoretical, but unless you happen to have done experiments with hundreds of computers with fragmentation ranging from a lot to a little and tested asset checking vefore and after defragmentation, it is the best way of determining how much effect defragmentation has on asset checking time.
And it seems Nuke has done a small-scale experiment of that type and found no significant effect...

It is unlikely that every single odf will be in a bunch of fragments unless the hard drive already had horrible fragmentation and very little remaining space when FO was installed. There could be twenty chunks of FO odfs, but I doubt we will see a few thousand.
Hard drives faster near the start? I've never heard of this before. It would require a default position on the read/write head to work that way.