OK, Inno then... sorry. No idea why I thought it was Mojo.

There are standalone defragmentors where you can have lots of settings but of course you need to understand hard drives to get the most out of that.

I think we users of spinning hard drives need to have a bit of patience :-)

I think some windows versions do that and I also am pretty sure one should disable that to prevent wear and tear on the disk/do their defragging if need be manually.

As for the apps, one should be careful. I used stuff like ultimate defrag in the mode where it moves system files around to defrag and it borked some system files once or twice on an older PC.

The newer gog installers are just terrible. There's no better compression on them, it's actually worse compared to older ones. I remember The Witcher 2 installers. The old installer was around 15 GB, and then the new/last one {3.5.0.26_(a)_(10696)} grew to around 18 GB. The installed game size remained the same, at around 23 GB.

The slower install time is not because of better compression, but because data is now written twice. The data is stored in the installer as many small files, with incomprehensible names, which are first decompressed in the user's Temp folders, and then repacked in the actual game's files, to the chosen location for the game. So the SSD users get the added benefit of getting their drives trashed faster. ;)

Unfortunately rar compression is not used anymore since a few years ago. I loved those installers - you could extract everything, or just a file, using WinRAR. No need for innounp or innoextract.


That's just a task in Task Scheduler (at least in Win 7), which I personally disable. I rather do it myself with Defraggler on a regular basis, or after I install something.

Just look in your user's Temp folders next time you install a game. Most likely in c:\Users\*your user name*\AppData\Local\Temp\ .

IIRC in programs like winrar and such the data is also written twice....once to a temporary folder and then to the destination.

Could be. Not obvious still and something to better be aware of. Sounds more like an old way of doing things and in need of modernizing.

Nope! Only if you convert an existing archive (like zip) to rar.

Perhaps programs cannot do such in Win10/Windows due to some limitation/feature?

Nvm I was thinking of opening(though not saving)rars via browser.

OP talking about fragmentation like it's 1999.
Reality is that fragmentation effects are so minor compared to those days especially 9x Windows. Same with invalid registry entries. You're better off not running a registry correcting err guessing program at all today either given how Windows is essentially unaffected by obsolete/leftover entries pointing to nothing vs potentially breaking the whole thing from a incorrect deletion.

Eh? While CPU speeds and memory bandwidth has improved a hundred-fold since the 90s, HDD seek time in consumer drives have barely halved while storage requirements for games have also increased up to 100x.

HDDs are a massive bottleneck today, and the physical movement of the read head is a slowdown that matters more than ever. You don't want to seek any more than necessary, and fragmentation causes unnecessary seeks. Of course, I'd just dump HDDs.

Even halving the seek time is very good, and a few seconds wait time seems like a "first world" problem....yes, some might need that extra speed, but most likely don't and can do other things while they wait instead of being impatient.

Also HDDs serve a purpose.....they are usually more cost efficient(when talking about disk space per dollar) and useful for redundant large backups of massive amounts of personal data.

Bottlenecks are never good. HDD slowness and thrashing can lead to much more than a few seconds of wait time. But it's not just wait time; lots of games are designed to load assets on the fly as needed and this can lead to irritating stuttering and lagging in game when the disk is too slow. And it's not just games, every program that competes for disk access and causes seeks is contributing to the problem. Avoiding fragmentation is the best one can do, short of buying more RAM or better storage media. Talk about first world problems.

Then installs games on the SSD to save on wait time for those games and apps, and leave the rest on HDD.....not every game needs super fast response times(although a few do).

As for competing access....mutli core cpus, better mobo/parts/etc can also help more than defragmenting.

What if one edits vast amount of graphical data as a job and keeps the data on their pc and backup drives? Or what if people have tons of memories saved in the form of home video to their pc? It's not always fluff and useless data.

Also fair enough to a degree, on your point here.

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/smaller_downloads/post5

Sorry but that guy already wished for better compression.