Preallocating

[buffyad]

What does this mean plaease

[𝕙.𝕓𝕒𝕣𝕜𝕒𝕤]

Basically it makes sure that the sectors on your drive where the game data will be written to are one block thus preventing fragmentation and thus assuring optimal load times and performance.
It's only a thing for HDD because on SSD it doesn't matter.

[Satoru]

Basically it saves the space on the hard drive so that the patching can actually have enough space to do the job it needs.

Without pre-allocation, you could in theory run out of disk space during the patching process because you also decided to download a few 4k movies onto the same drive

[The_Driver]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Basically it saves the space on the hard drive so that the patching can actually have enough space to do the job it needs.

Without pre-allocation, you could in theory run out of disk space during the patching process because you also decided to download a few 4k movies onto the same drive

Which could however happen in the pre-allocation phase, it's not that much of a win really.

Like really, for small files it's unlikely to run out but at least quick, for large files the overhead is significant, like for Path of Exile it adds around 13 GB / disk_speed to the patching process, so with slow drives - say 50 MB/s sequential write - it's 4 and a half minutes of overhead to ensure that. The actual patching also takes a bit of time, but what are the chances of running out of disk space? Even if you assume small free capacity, it'd be way lower than 50% to run into it exactly during the update. (If it happens before the update, a check for free space would prevent the patch from occurring in the first place) So with just a few updates, the overhead outweighs the benefit of having to not redo a single update.

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Pre-allocation basically means writing a file full of zeros.

[Freelinkx]

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[BeenJamminMon]

Originally posted by h.barkas:

Basically it makes sure that the sectors on your drive where the game data will be written to are one block thus preventing fragmentation and thus assuring optimal load times and performance.
It's only a thing for HDD because on SSD it doesn't matter.

Are you sure it doesn't matter on an SSD...? I get it all the time on my SSD for larger games..

[Juan Carlos Messi]

Originally posted by BeenJamminMon:

Originally posted by h.barkas:

Basically it makes sure that the sectors on your drive where the game data will be written to are one block thus preventing fragmentation and thus assuring optimal load times and performance.
It's only a thing for HDD because on SSD it doesn't matter.

Are you sure it doesn't matter on an SSD...? I get it all the time on my SSD for larger games..

Yah same, when I downloaded Ghost Recon it gave that to me, and I assume for other large games it would also do it.