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Zippy6 on 18 January 2026
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Zkuq said:
Pemalite said:

It was only done on optical disks, mechanical hard disks didn't "duplicate data" to strategically position chunks of data for performance reasons.
Game developers don't control where data gets placed on a mechanical hard drive anyway, it's the Operating System that manages that through the file system... And not all file systems are competent at managing data placement, thus requiring de-fragmentation of mechanical drives on a semi-regular basis.

Really? Do games duplicate data because of optical media despite probably everything getting installed on mass storage anyway since like ten years ago...? I thought it had something to do with seek times, which, as far as I know, is an issue with HDDs as well.

Actually a quick search online reinforces my understanding, but I didn't look into it that deeply.

Asset duplication was absolutely a thing on HDDs, hell it's likely still done on some games now as it's just how developers have structured their files for ages, but it was more a necessity on HDDs for streaming assets.

Mark Cerny talked about it before.

"Without duplication, drive performance drops through the floor - a target 50MB/s to 100MB/s of data throughput collapsed to just 8MB/s in one game example Cerny looked at. Duplication massively increases throughput, but of course, it also means a lot of wasted space on the drive."

https://www.digitalfoundry.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-playstation-5-the-mark-cerny-tech-deep-dive

Spiderman for example stores all the assets needed for a city block together, so when that block is loaded as you move through the city all the data is together on the drive to be read fast. Which lead to them at one point having a trash bag asset duplicated over 600 times and taking up a gig of data before they kept it stored in RAM instead.

A lot of games will have big chunk files for levels that contain all the assets for that level, even if the asset has appeared in another level previously.