Uuh. That is exactly how games work.

And that's completely normal. Every modern game has multiple versions of the same asset at various detail levels, all of which are used. And when you choose between "low, medium, high" that doesn't mean there's a giant pile of assets that go un-used. The game will use them all, rendering a different version of an asset depending on how close to something you are. The settings often just change how far away the game will render at the highest quality, before it starts to drop down to the lower LODs (level of detail).

That's why the games aren't much smaller on console, for exanple. They're not including all the unnecessary assets for different graphics settings from PC. They are all part of how modern game work.

"Handling that in the code" would still involve storing it all somewhere after "generation", same way shaders are better generated in advance, lest you get a stuttery mess.

And it isn't how most game do things even today. Such code does not exist. Not yet at least. Human artists produce better results, and hence games ship with every version of every asset.

Finally automating this is what Unreals nanite system has only recently promised to do, but it has run into snags.

I can’t place why, but the thought of used enterprise SSDs still sketches me out more than HDDs. Maybe it’s just that I only ever think of RAID in terms of hard drives, paired with a decade+ of hearing about SSD reliability issues, which are very different from the more familiar problems HDDs can have.

The power and noise difference makes it more appealing to me, moreso than the speed, personally. Maybe when consumer bottom-barrel SSDs get a little better I could be convinced into RAIDing a bunch of them and hoping one cold spare is enough.

EDIT: I can acquire new ~200$ 4TB Orico branded drives where I am relatively easily. Hm.

More than triple the next largest game. All I want is the zombies mode and space to install other games, I could probably cull 80% of the COD suite and be just fine, but I have to carry the whole bag to reach in ‍️

My manager ordered four "4TB" external SSDs from AliExpress a few weeks back. He paid £60 total for them, delivered.

My Sus alarm started clanging, so I grabbed one off him and ran some tests on it.

After a couple of days of the tests chuntering along, I ended up reasonably convinced that they're - at most - 40GB. And even at that capacity they're useless, transferring at around 10MB/s

The game is 50GB, the other 200GB is just "fuck you" space.

Imagine losing a 50tb drive because you choose to use Seagate.

Seagate Exos is usually ok. Their generic stuff, is sometimes crap, but that's true of all manufacturers, really.

That being said, I'd be nervous with a single huge drive, no matter where it's from. And even as part of a redundant structure, the rebuild times would be through the roof.

I'd buy two and only turn the other on for a once a month backup. For one lone pirate just running two drives, it would be endgame basically. You're good.

Ah yes. Seagate. The trash storage device company. If you want to burn your money, just throw it into a fire before buying this e-waste.

Can not recommend.

I have a 20TB seagate exos drive in my main pc and I hate it. Partly due to my case, but it’s noisy and does an obnoxious head reset (or whatever) every 7 minutes or so. It’s so loud.

I've only got 32tb in the family Raid 5 (actually 24TB since I lose a drive to parity), but my girl really loves her trash TV while she works so we're on like 90% full.

And I'm just a podunk machinist.

Is it a mechanical drive?

Show me a 40tb ssd lol

These drives aren't for home desktops, they're more for server setups with large datasets and redundancy. Lol why do you need a 20tb drive in your main PC?

I have 4 x 20tb drives in a truenas where I have backups, movies, and music, network accessible for the whole house.

How about a 122.88tb SSD? Large SSDs are pretty common in the enterprise market and arguably much easier to manufacture since you only need to put a bunch of nand chips on a pcb.

Oh thank God, 40,000 gigabytes was not enough

They're mechanical drives, every mechanical drive company has issues. I have had 4 of the 20tb drives in a truenas setup since last summer with zero issues. Drives in this size should be redundant and under warranty, expect drives to die, they're consumables. Replace, resilver, move on with life.

Thank you! I lol'd at the guy with one in his main PC lol. Like why?

I wish. I've got 6000 movies, 200 series, 300k songs, games, etc. pushing 30tb usage. I need to redo my setup, right now it's raid 10. I know it's not the most efficient with space, but I feel much better about redundancy.

Wow great. From seagate. The company that produces drives with the by far lowest life expectancy compared to the competiton