alt Hacker NewsHDDs also have a spinning medium and a read head , so the optimization is similar to optical media like CDs.
Let’s say you have UI textures that you always need, common player models and textures, the battle music, but world geometry and monsters change per stage. Create an archive file (pak, wad, …) for each stage, duplicating UI, player and battle music assets into each archive. This makes it so that you fully utilize HDD pages (some small config file won’t fill 4kb filesystem pages or even the smaller disk sectors). All the data of one stage will be read into disk cache in one fell swoop as well.
On optical media like CDs one would even put some data closer to the middle or on the outer edge of the disc because the reading speed is different due to the linear velocity.
This is an optimization for bandwidth at the cost of size (which often wasn’t a problem because the medium wasn’t filled anyway)
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The game installer can't control the layout on an HDD without doing some very questionable things like defragging and moving existing user files around the disk. It probably _could_ but the risk of irrecoverable user data loss or accidentally corrupting a boot partition via a bug would make it completely not worth it.
Even if you pack those, there's no guarantee they don't get fragmented by the filesystem.
CDs are different not because of media, but because of who owns the storage media layout.
> HDDs also have a spinning medium and a read head , so the optimization is similar to optical media like CDs.
HDDs also have to real with fragmentation, I wonder what the odds that you get to write 150 GBs (and then regular updates in the 30GB range) without breaking it into fragments...