Compressed image format?
#1
As Dolphin (Wii emulator) is able to handle a compressed image format I wonder if such thing could ever come to PCSX2? DVD images take a huge amount of disk space - but when compressed it's often half as large or even smaller...

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#2
PCSX2 can do it, but only via the Linuz ISO CDVD plugin. You should recompress your ISO via this plugin, and it uses a proprietary format which only this plugin can read. However, experience shows that using NTFS file compression (e.g. compress your ISOs folder and all its subfolders: right-click -> properties -> advanced -> Compress content) yields similar results (speed, compression ratio) and is much easier to operate. Plus, you get the added benefit that PCSX2 doesn't need a CDVD plugin and you still get an MRU list at the CDVD menu.
#3
Thank you for the info! I didn't thought of the NTFS file compression! Great idea! Smile

By the way: is it possible to run into performance problems when turning the file compression on?
#4
Probably none that you'd notice.
#5
i don't recommend using NTFS compression on a boot drive on any folder though. It increases IO times heavily and leads to general system sluggishness
NTFS compression also increases defrag times.
#6
(06-06-2012, 09:33 PM)Squall Leonhart Wrote: i don't recommend using NTFS compression on a boot drive on any folder though. It increases IO times heavily and leads to general system sluggishness
NTFS compression also increases defrag times.

I'm guessing that if it's compress-once-read-many, as is the case when compressing ISOs, the penalty wouldn't be high, if at all. If the drive is badly fragmented, it might even increase performance since it needs to read/seek less for the same chunk of data..
#7
I just compressed the whole images directory. Then I tried loading some of the games - I can not notice any difference in loading time! But I won about 50 GB of free disk space! Smile
#8
Would it matter on a high-end Solid State Drive like mine?

Fragmentation doesn't matter on an SSD. Would compression matter much?

It's 550MBPS read and 500MBPS write.

Edit : SSD Details.
#9
Probably not, really. The real bottleneck with compression is the CPU overhead of decompression. Since the files occupy less sectors, being compressed, fragmentation becomes even less important.

Fragmentation is mainly a problem because it forces the drive's read head to rush back and forth across the platter to read a single file. Solid state drives have no such technical problem.

One thing to note is that defragmenting a solid state drive is actually not healthy, from a technical standpoint. Flash memory has a limited number of write cycles before it burns out, and defragmenting is squandering this with pointless shuffling about.
#10
I did a few defragments before discovering this. I'm hoping that the some 20 defrags before learning didn't harm it too much, as well as my constant cleaning of things like temp files.

Now I know that the only thing that matters is wear leveling. You can get something like Diskeeper for improved wear leveling but I think Windows 7 does a pretty good job of it already, so I don't need to pay for something like that.




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