Clean up and defrag!

[Sniper297]

Been a lot of complaints about corrupted save games lately, how many of those are caused by disk read/write errors? If you have a solid state drive as your only disk this doesn't apply, but even if you're running SH4 from a secondary SSD the savegames still go into the C:\My Documents folder. If that's a standard hard drive then bad sectors and/or fragmentation could easily corrupt files that are frequently replaced or updated. Like save game files.

Computers write files to the hard disk starting at the beginning, working toward the end, and sticking files into the first empty block they find. If they're writing a 2 meg file and the first empty space the computer sees is 512 kilobytes, it will stick a quarter of the file into that spot, then hunt for the next empty space to stick the rest of the file. So that 2 meg file could easily end up fragmented into 2 or 3 or even half a dozen segments, causing loading problems as the game hunts all over the disk for all the pieces of the file. Got stuttering, got problems patching, got corrupted files, need to do some computer maintenance. A computer ain't Nintendo.




First thing is open Windows Explorer, RIGHT click on the C drive, select Properties. Click the disk cleanup, sit back and read a book cuz it's gonna take a while. When it's finished empty the recycle bin.




Next step if you haven't done it for a while, or if you have never done it, is run the check disk. You'll need to reboot for this one. When that's finished, click the Defragment Now.



This is what a healthy defragged hard drive should look like, if it's full of red lines and blocks there's not only performance problems, but it also causes corrupt save game files.

[merc4ulfate]

If you do have two drives the easiest method would be to move the MY Documents folder to the drive that IS NOT your system drive.

I never keep "MY ..." anything folders on the system drive.

To see how this works right click MY PICTURES then hit PROPERTIES. Now hit the LOCATION tab. From there you can have your MY anything folder saved to what ever drive you want. You can even store it on another computer as long as it is on the same network and never lose your "MY" anything folders.

Every drive in your computer could die and if you have saved your My what ever to a network drive you lose nothing. You rebuild the system have it point to the network drive and boom all your photos, documents, downloads and anything else is right there again.