A little question about HDDs and Repack Games
 

I read on the internet and had a experience (twice) about repack games can damage the HDD because some repackers (including me) have methods that extract thousands of folders and small files and inject back to original file. This process make the drive use the maximum read/write throught the folders and can let the files fragmented. I had 2 (almost the current) HDD damaged over the years that i installed and made repack games. It is true or just coincidence what happened to me? Repack games can really damage the Hard Disk?

Sorry for the bad english

we must not explode anything, an HD survives for use that do, without blaming short or long installations, you logical thing that prolonged writing over the months and years can break the motor and the mechanical positioning of the heads, an HD it is tested (4-5 years) on the nucleus of the disc support bearings, but objectively if the user uses it for 12 hours per day in continuous writing, the hours of the hard disck life are shortened inevitably.

Thanks for the info.

Typical urban myth. Browsing the web creates and deletes thousands and millions of files. Reading/writing files is a NORMAL mode for any HDD. Just make defragmentation once a week or so to keep random access at good speed.

WoW, i never think in defragment my Hard Drive, maybe this is the problem. Thank you, FitGirl, love your repacks :)

modern windows (win7 and later) automatically defragments hdds

who still using hard drive for main OS ?:p
on SSD windows does not allow defragmentation it waste of ssd write cycles..
but when using hdd it better to monitor temperature when doing large write to the drive recommended not above 40C

Background defragmentation is not as good as complete one, especially when you're low on space. I use Auslogic Disk Defrag, it's free and pretty good and fast.

It may not really be a myth from my point of view, I mean a hard drive is mechanical, there are moving parts and it can be compare best to an engine of a car. What you're saying there "web creates and deletes thousands and millions of files" can be challenged by saying, at what rate does a browser actually create and delete those thousands and million files? I'll take GTAV as an example, way before we had to use rawdet and rawrest, and repacks needed close to 140GB some less just install the game. Now look at that figure, 140GB and how long did the installation take? Hmm, 4 hours at best and a day when installing on slower PCs, don't forget srep virtual temp which can be as big as 10GB. So 140GB or more IO from the repack itself + reflate temps, all that must happen in 4-24 hours, the temperature will obviously increase and stay as high as possible meanwhile things like oil also heat up and a couple of mechanisms that don't like to be run at high revs for a long period of time. Now let's look at browsing, do you really think a browser can do so much IO? The answer is yes, but the question is how frequently must it be used in order for it to match the frequency of a repack installing? Well the answer is a long time, I myself don't even think a browser can make 140GB of IO even in 10 days meaning, yes millions of files will be created an deleted but the hard drive mechanisms will not be over working because at the rate at which they are created an deleted, I mean for example looking for information on wikipedia, I open a page, thousand files are created, it's obvious I opened the page to view information, I read for 20 minutes, IO transfer is very low, because I'm reading something then I say, I'm done reading this, I move to the next page, old files deleted and new files deleted, it's like that, while a repack, whenever it gets the chance to create and delete a file, depending on HDD speed, it will just keep going and going until installation is finished, meanwhile I'm not even done reading my 7th page on the web and total IO is only 33mb. Example, idiot driving from England to France to watch a football game, driving the car to its max vs some guy driving at normal speeds, it's obvious the guy who's driving fast is a repacker and the guy driving slow is a browser, the guy driving fast will mess up the engine because of things like high revs and etc.

Long story short, repacks can actually break HDD because they can actually strain the disk because of rapid activity, there's heat that's generated.

Simple example
https://www.quora.com/How-does-a-hig...ect-the-engine

Temps or not, since a hard drive is not like SSD which has a limit number of writes, The only thing HDD surfers from is it being mechanical but other than that it can probably work forever.

great post razor:cool:
may i add using shingled magnetic recording hard drive should be great for large write...
and the newest hard drives is Helium-filled which make wear and tear less of an issue

140 GB / 4 hour = 10 MB/sec, that's not much work. so, slow installations means exactly opposite - hdd has little work and it doesn't heat up. just the same as with browsing. the real measure is I/O operations/sec or preferably disk seeks/sec

i lost two HDDs. it may be just luck, or just seagate quality, or because i fed torrents from them. both lived 3-4 years or so, and at least with the first drive i seeded 24h/day. overall i seeded 20 TB, so you need to perfrom 10 TB I/O in 8KB (?) portions to lose one HDD

Firstly 140GB is the space that is needed, but let me run though everything you can see what we are dealing with here.

First of all, 4 hours was just a simple example because this is rarely achievable on HDD, some take 18 hours and 4 hours is something you get if running on SSD unless if you're using something like pzlib or a more reworked reflate.

Secondly, 45GB of the data is inflated to 90GB and that makes it 90GB of thousands of raw files.

Lastly repackers for some reason never let srep be free to choose how much memory it should use by itself by using cls-srep which has a 2GB limit because of x86 restrictions, which means a 8GB srep virtual temp needs to be created even if the person who is installing the game has 32GB, will still be restricted.

When you equate all this IO, Firstly the data that is inflated is compressed to something like 18GB.
lzma decompresses, that's 18GB read, and IO write does not count because it's data directly to srep via stdio.
Srep will have to deploy 8GB virtual temp, depending on how much did it want in the first place, I've seen it needing 10GB, so it's 10GB - 2GB ram restriction (normally srep is set to use 512mb physical memory)
From that 8GB, srep will actually have to seek and do that stuff to grab the repetitions it found and place them where they are supposed to be.
That's 8GB that's being written to disk so far by srep creating it's virtual memory.
srep will have to read a couple of times from that 8GB, it order for it to make writes for 88gb worth of data which are just thousands if not a million of temp files

Reads = 18gb + some reads that srep does to be able to restore 88gb * 0.8
Writes = 8gb + 88gb

raw2hif is run from that 88gb, and 88gb is read to restore the data back to 44gb if ratio was 200% for inflation which is the case.

rawrest also needs to be run 44gb to 44gb just to restore data back to its correct order

reads = 18gb + some reads that srep does to be able to restore 88gb * 0.8 + 88gb + 44gb
writes = 8gb + 88gb + 44gb

total IO = 290gb + some reads that srep does to be able to restore (88gb * 0.8) which is roughly 300gb-350gb in 4 hour of total IO + millions of temp files + lzma reading data from archive + srep reading from VM and giving data to FA while FA is writing to disk, nah, "that's not much work".

Since you said "just the same as with browsing" it's either 350gb total IO is easily written to disk in 4 hours while being bottlenecked by hardware or the hard disk is overworking just to make the archive unpack in 4 hours and overworking means more heat.

BTW, this is just my opinion, some stuff might be incorrect.

Edit:
From that, game takes its own time to load stuff and etc, you complain online then people tell you to defrag, from all that last activity of installing repack, game is like 65GB, you go ahead and defrag, since read and write was interrupted many times because of those million temps, run defrag, windows rearranges data, more IO. 350gb + 65gb x 110-200%. Theoretically, somewhere 450-500gb total IO in 4-24 hours, if you are going to defrag drive straight away after installing.

Personally I think Razor right, guys defragment our HD Ok, but if we take it to kick ass from morning to evening 24/24 hours, with a disk core engine always in rotation, and actuator arm of the head with head in continuous writing, I do not think there is a miracle drug to make him extend life that much.;)

for more in depth analysis on hard drive and ssd you can check in pcper site there a ton of articles wrote by allyn malventano, he is an expert on storage

I'm confused? ......

are they an 'idiot' for driving from England to France?
or
are they an 'idiot' for watching a Football game?
or
is it a combination of both? Are they an 'idiot' for driving from England to France to watch a football game? :D :p

Yup, the English Nazi is here...

While it's true - it's a normal operation for HDD. The same would happen if you've decided to copy several terabytes from one partition of HDD to another. Or if you simply seed/leech many torrents at the same time. If a HDD fails in such situations - it's not repack's problem, but user's (if he didn't provide normal cooling) or HDD's (it was faulty from the beginning).

I have my HDDs with games for many years, I install each repack on them on daily basis, many times. Much more than any user will ever do. And they all are OK. Of course some day they will die, but that's the electronics - it can't work forever.

HOW about DNA storage ?

I appreciate all the answers of you guys. So, if i create the repack (in SSD) and install the repack (in SSD too), can be the solution to avoid the intense work of mechanical parts and the excessive temperature of my HDD ?

I not have an SSD, by the way :p

Razor i think has hit the spot with most of the stuff he spoke about on HDD's.
Dont Seed torrents and repack to the same drive.Thats just to much work for a everyday consumer drive.Personally i would look at a Surveillance type of Drive that is somewhat made to handle the constant writing to it.Nas storages drives out of the question.

If you want to use normal type consumer drives invest a little extra into like Seagate Constellation Drives or Western Digital Black or Blue (RED is also a Option but if you cant find anything else).One should get more read and writes out of a good quality mechanical drive than a SSD.Western Digital Green drives and these ultra low power drives are not optimum either but great for storage.

If you can afford the SSD drives go ahead. Look at the Sandisk 480GB drives they are priced fairly decently on Amazon and Newegg.

If you want to go balls to the wall on speed and money is not a issue use SAS SSD drives in Hardware RAID 0 or the New Pci-E SSD drives like the Samsung 950 Pro's.

Just my 2 Cents.Speaking from personal experience as i have personally used every type of storage drives from Consumer grade to Business Solutions that has be available over the past 18 Years+-.

Learned a lot of things from this useful thread. :)

Based these useful information, I think it would be a suggestion the repack creators add "Pause" ability to their installation. It is good for too slow installations.