Fragmentation over time?

[bozon]

I have a question about Open PS2 Loader.

Will a HDD using OPL for GAMING ONLY get fragmented over time? Is anything written to the HDD when gaming?

[rimi]

fragmentation only occurs when you have a thousand to millions of chunk files. Since PS2 uses big files like as big as 4gb-7.2gb sometimes 600mb, so I really doubt that a fragmentation will occur with this one.

[sojakai]

Yes, Fragmentation will occur over time. But it comes from Installing and Deleting Games from the hard drive. When you delete a game and install another game, it fits as much of the game in the first open space available, then any overflow goes into the next available. So part of your game may end up at the end of your installed games if its bigger than the game deleted right before. The simple way of dealing with this is to temporarily remove the games from HDD and then reinstall them. I would suggest doing this with WinHip as it will make fast work of it. Start from the First installed game and work your way to Last and you wont have to remove more than a couple at a time as you work through.

Other than that, Don't worry about it.

I have also made sure to put the +OPL directory First on the HDD before installing games and giving it a size of 1gig (1024) just to make sure that it always has room for anything that I might do with it, mostly VMC. I haven't even used a quarter of it and I have just about every game cover in my art folder, several versions of opl, and about 20 VMCs at 8mb each. Plenty of room to grow.

[LocalH]

AFAIK, fragmentation doesn't matter at all with APA-formatted internal HDDs, only with USB (and to a lesser extent SMB). Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.

[bozon]

Thanks for your input guys!
I was curious out of an techical point of view, if the files on my USB-device will be fragmented over time when I use it for gaming.
However, I don´t know why it would be fragmented, isn´t it read-only?

[Bat Rastard]

Your ISO images shouldn't fragment from just normal play. CFG and VMC data probably will since that data has a higher write-to-read ratio. The degree of fragmentation may depend on the file system. I don't think CFG and VMC data on APA-formatted partitions such as internal HDD will fragment. But it's probably a given on FAT32 and NTFS formatted ETH shares on Windows/Ubuntu hosts. ETH shares on Ubuntu/Linux EXT formatted partitions may not fragment at all until drive space gets scarce ...