"Optimize your install" Is there a need on SSd- drives?

[Steew]

Since SSD's don't use a spinning platter is it really necessary to basically "defrag" them like this optimization is offering?

[Grey Star, The Rival Defender]

I'm 99% certain that optimizing the install refers to cleaning up Warframe's actual installation because updates to the game overtime can cause issues or something.

[CazadorDeLobo]

Hi. You seem to be confused as to the difference between the two technologies in this case. The issue is shared between HDDs and SSDs, where data is stored in not the most perfect sequence of data, and often blocks of information that are frequently accessed together are "far apart", so to speak. This is remedied by taking some of the information and clumping it to the closest available blocks(kind of a misnomer to be clear, data is more complicated than this) to the data to its partner blocks(the game data.)

Optimizing works about the same, it merely pushes the data close together, which can speed up loading times dramatically.

[kszaso]

optimizing in the warframe launcher basically defrags the game data, and deletes game files that are no longer used, freeing up space as well

[Whiplash]

https://www.pcgamer.com/should-i-defrag-my-ssd/

Originally posted by CazadorDeLobo:

Optimizing works about the same, it merely pushes the data close together, which can speed up loading times dramatically.

"Since SSDs have no moving parts, hence “Solid State”, there's no seek time or rotational latency. Instead, SSDs access flash memory (NAND) at much higher speeds, typically less than 50us—that's 50 microseconds, or compared to a typical hard drive with a 15ms average access time, about 300 times faster. But there's more to the story than just speed."

"Because of the way SSDs work, not only does data not become fragmented, but running a defragmentation utility will actually burn through the program/erase cycles and potentially cause premature 'death' of your SSDs. It's not something that would happen quickly—a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo as an example is rated for 150TB of total writes, or the equivalent of writing to every block of the drive at least 300 times. With typical users writing less than 20GB per day on average, it would require more than 20 years to burn through 150TB of writes. But defragmenting could easily write hundreds of GB of data, which would wear out an SSD much faster."


There are no seek times on SSD drives. All data is accessed at the same speed. And it appears it's unhealthy to do too much data moving/writing. Optimizing is the same as defragmenting.

[CazadorDeLobo]

I said optimizing, not defragging. If the launcher also "defrags" as you put it, then yeah it would be harmful. But by strawmanning me just because you like arguing, you've also misled OP or the other people reading to believe that running the optimization service on WF launcher would cause "premature death".

Please, try not to just totally misconstrue my words to make me easier to attack. Get a life.(get me one while you're at it)

[Burstnok]

yeah it checks for no longer needed files or temporary files and cleans them up

[jonnin]

do SSD read blocks though? The way rotating read sectors? If its reading blocks of fragmented mess, rather than blocks of all one file, it might help. But I don't know how this works, shamefully. I need to look at what the drivers do for these things...

[Sceles]

Originally posted by CazadorDeLobo:

I said optimizing, not defragging. If the launcher also "defrags" as you put it, then yeah it would be harmful. But by strawmanning me just because you like arguing, you've also misled OP or the other people reading to believe that running the optimization service on WF launcher would cause "premature death".

Please, try not to just totally misconstrue my words to make me easier to attack. Get a life.(get me one while you're at it)

Do you have any proof? I have always thought that the cache optimization simply deletes unnecessary files and defrags, which is why it takes so much time, because defrag takes time. And like Whiplash already said, defrag offers no benefit on SSDs. Windows 10 performs silent defrag operations on HDDs but if it detects that the disk that is attached is an SSD then it won't perform it, for the same reasons already listed by Whiplash.

It could be playing around with compressed files and putting contents from multiple compressed containers to a single container so that the PC needs to do less work when accessing it, but it's a very far fetched guess and a simple defrag is far more likely.