"Turns out, it's old, platter-based storage mediums with their slow, spinny discs to blame. Unlike more modern solid state drives that have evolved beyond the need for mechanical moving parts, hard-disk drives (HDDs) are really slow, and by duplicating various bits of data, you can improve performance for those on older hardware. So yeah, that massive install size actually represents multiple copies of the various bits of code that make up Helldivers 2."
"For example, our build system will ensure that a copy of a tree texture is stored on the same part of the disk as the level geometry data. When the game loads the level, the read head can access all the necessary information on a single, continuous sweep, without having to "seek" to a different location. This dramatically speeds up loading times."
Helldivers 2 can require around 141.51GB on PC because the installation duplicates many data files to improve performance on platter-based hard-disk drives. Duplicate copies place essential assets physically close to related geometry so HDD read heads can retrieve required information in a single continuous sweep, reducing seek time and speeding loads. Solid-state drives avoid mechanical seek delays and thus do not need such duplication. Roughly 12 percent of PC gamers on Steam still use HDDs, so maintaining duplicated assets preserves acceptable loading performance for that segment at the cost of larger on-disk footprint.
Read at Kotaku
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