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Yes defragmenting them frequently helps a lot especially after a lot of asset editing, route building, and data downloading.
Now why John? There are a couple of things at play here first on a drive that is less than 70% full win 10 does quite a nice job of writing the files contiguously and keeping associated files together. When you want to read a group of files it's best if they are together if you've defragged the drive you're moving files around the drive so that one file is contiguous but that can break up a group of files.
The other problem with defragging is are you really putting the file together physically? These days the outer tracks have more sectors for data than the inner ones. So track 23 sector 22 and track 23 sector 23 may well be on different physical tracks and require a head movement.
Cheerio John
It depends on the drive. Typically, sectors on adjacent tracks are offset by the exact time required for one track step. So stepping from the 'end' of one physical track to the 'start' of the next is extremely fast, and not something that a defraggger needs to be concerned about.So track 23 sector 22 and track 23 sector 23 may well be on different physical tracks and require a head movement.
So an SSD is not necessarily the best Hard Drive type for Trainz installations, and Trainz route sessions ?
And the Disc Type Hard Drives are best for Trainz installations, and Trainz route sessions ?
So why would even I want an SSD Hard Drive in the first place, if they are so prone to instant failure ?
If I were to be in the market to buy a new desktop PC, that has both a SSD, as well as a HDD, would it be best to just buy 2 Disc Type Hard Drives, and totally forget about the SSD Hard Drive completely ?
It depends on the drive. Typically, sectors on adjacent tracks are offset by the exact time required for one track step. So stepping from the 'end' of one physical track to the 'start' of the next is extremely fast, and not something that a defraggger needs to be concerned about.
Why defrag? I tried not defragging, based upon the same assumptions and statements made here. In the end, I found TS12, and later T:ANE and TRS19 getting slower and slower, and more so after installing DLC and lots of disk writes such as route editing. After defragging, which took a long time by the way, the performance improved substantially.
So 16 Gb RAM is good enough, and 32 Gb RAM would be complete overkill, and would be totally unnecessary and a waste of money ?
Would two internal 1TB Disc Type Hard Drives be better ?
One internal 1TB Disc Type Hard Drive devoted just only for the OS, and PC files, photos, documents, downloads, music etc, etc ?
And the second internal 1TB Disc Type Hard Drive devoted only just for Trainz, route editing, asset editing, surveyor, CMP files, CDP downloads ?
I would think that an external Western Digital - MyBook, 1TB Disc Type Hard Drive, connected via USB cable, would be a slower bottlenecked data transfer when running Trainz
I would think that a 3rd Hard Drive SSD could be just only devoted to running a single Trainz route session and would be faster performance and better framerates, and not be used for surveyor, nor CDP's, nor other downloads ? As if the SSD blew out, all you would lose is the 1 route Driver Session
One thing to consider is your use model. I have been doing a lot of session creation lately. With my M.2 SSD switching back and forth between editor and driver seems to be 10 to 20 times faster. Could save you an hour or more in a long evening of wasting time on Trainz
@johnwhelan
I might put the Trainz software on a hard drive but the assets are better on an SSD. You don't need to worry about fragmentation. Since the cells are read directly then there is no advantage to placing them together.
This discussion has started me thinking about writes to the SSD in Trainz. I assume most of the computing in Trainz operation (eg. driving) is done in RAM memory and VRAM. But how many writes occur if your are editing a route or session? Do these go in the Build, or somewhere in tane.exe subdirectory? Right now, I have both the build and program on SSD. But I am beginning to wonder if this is the best approach for minimizing writes to the SSD. Maybe just the build should be there? Don't know.