Glad to see you recognize you were completely wrong and had to shift the conversation to a different topic.

frankly it seems a bit late in the game to start worrying about low level simple optimization like this. Perhaps they are upset that they had to endure bloated installs for so long? which seems reasonable considering the enormously ridiculous 145gb....

resource hell. which version of ChromeShaderFinalV7 was it, the one that says FINALFINALChromeShaderFinalv7 or the one that says "IGNORE FINAL FINAL USE THIS ONE INSTEAD V7"?

I've looked, what you say is mostly accurate but getting a bit dated - the NVME performance gap with SATA SSDs keeps widening especially with DirectStorage games (eg Spider Man 2 - triple the load speed vs SATA). This gap will continue to widen as devs focus performance improvements on the tech available to them, and as the price difference between SATA SSDs and NVME is diminishing rapidly (only a 5% difference in common mid tier models now) there is very little reason to recommend SATA over NVMe for cost reasons - which was kinda the focus of this thread. I'd not advise anyone today to buy a SATA SSD over NVMe for gaming unless the cost saving was large. First article I could find from a website I recognised (there are so many SEO-stuffing AI-generated trash sites today to wade through its truly frustrating) - https://www.techspot.com/article/3023-ssd-gaming-comparison-load-times/ The performance improvements outside of load times, eg *during gaming* are significant but harder to benchmark, because pop-in of assets during gameplay is not something we can currently easily measure, it's something you need to compare side by side videos of and there are many that show significant stuttering and pop-in for DirectStorage games like Ratchet and Clank. Another analysis with some videos double, triple or longer wait times in-games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl8wXT8F3W4

I would rather have a 17h unzip than a 17h download, a 17h unzip means my computer is transferring data for the entire time rather than downloading the file for 30 minutes and unzipping it completely locally.

It takes you 17 hours to download a 30gb game? Not going to lie, its a bit suspicious how long firgirl repacks take to unpack. In my opinion.

To account for people using different systems with different executable paths, we will be placing a copy of this script in every single folder in your computer. -microsoft probably idk

A lot of consoles ship with a 500GB spinning hard drive. I think Sony published HD2 so we can almost exclusively blame consoles for the size requirements

It has to do with seek times where hdds literally have to travel to the spindle with the relevant data, so storing it multiple times means it finds what it needs faster

Yeah, PS5 games are made with the assumption that they'll have access to a 5GB/s drive. It makes sense that they might actually benefit from that. I saw a test of [Ratchet and Clank running on a HDD](https://youtu.be/28G3VYps-rM?t=33) and the main difference was the portals that mask the load times were comically long. And it's true the difference in price isn't that great any more. Personally I've got an older SATA in my PC and a NVME. I try to install to the faster drive where I can, but since my PC actually has a worse CPU than my Legion Go S, I'm not likely to see a lot of benefit from it. I suppose you've got a better chance of picking up a used SATA drive on the cheap if you really need to save money.

Stop spying on me! I do to IDEs what common people do with browser tabs.

$ScriptDir = $ThisScriptPath if ($ScriptDir ≠ $GameFilePath) { Set-Path $GameFilePath } (⌐■_■)

Yeah, very reasonable. I updated my original comment to highlight that I was overstating the problem. Thanks for your comments.

the struggle is real