This sounds like nonsense to me.

https://www.arrowheadgamestudios.com/2025/10/helldivers-2-tech-blog-1-install-size/

They're worried that the physical space between textures on a hard drive will be too big so they copied the data three times?

@ben it makes sense if your media is something fixed sized like dvds

but on a hard disk?

@ben wear leveling is not done on the fs level on computers and phones and the like, and is not performed on HDDs due to how negatively it affects performance

@ben copy on write isn’t wear leveling, it’s ensuring that partial writes either don’t apply at all or fully apply

@ben but generally speaking assuming that sufficient unfragmented space is available, if you write a large file to disk it will just span a linear allocation with no fragments, if there are no concurrent writers

@charlotte but helldivers 2 isn't a single 150 gigabyte file, it's eight thousand files:

https://steamdb.info/depot/553853/

@ben are people still running games from spinning media?

i mean, i am, but i'm not the average pc gamer. and the games i play tend to fit entirely in page cache

@codl @ben Might also be a case of the awful I/Os on Windows.

@lanodan @codl yeah but it doesn't matter because loading stuff should not occur during gameplay, especially i a game like helldivers which has finite maps and loading screens

@ben but ben loading screens are so two decades ago. now every game must stream every asset and be single take like god of war (i dont know if helldivers has loading screens)

@ben ???

@ben data locality on a device you have no control over is a fun gamble