It's more of directly to gog but i feel unfit for support ticket.

I get it gog compresses files considerably to reduce size, but the cost is more time (and electricity) to unpack. On top of that if you install on mechanical hard drive it heavily fragments the files and you need additional time to defragment. I tested zipping game files with zero compression. The size is larger of course but unpacking is several times faster and with certain programs (7-zip) it is done with near to zero fragmentation. I hope it's possible to make the compression milder, and at least do try to fix the fragmentation.

I don't really see how having a larger file hogging up resources would help with fragmentation. IMO in this day and age, the benefits of better compression far outweigh the time (and electricity :)) overhead: reduced download times, less data traffic for people with capped internet connections, less write operations on SSDs.

The only thing I see would improve things is on-the-fly in-memory decompression while streaming the data to avoid having to write the compressed data to disk.

Sometimes I wish GOG offered torrents.

They do.

Yes, I can see the forums now, war of the ring has just been released on GOG uncompressed, and the entire world internet goes down as half a million people try to download 150gb each. Compression exists for a reason and stopping using it due to some minor inconvenience on your HDd or a few minutes extra install time isn’t going to change that. If it is such and issue, get an ssd, they are real cheap.

Sure it depends on the configuration, I'll tell you mine. I have a large external hard drive where I keep the installers (connected via usb 3). I also have a fast uncapped internet connection. I install the games on a smaller internal hdd. Then that (not the installers) I need to defragment. Updates are actually not that frequent, most of the installers are downloaded once or twice but installing and uninstalling might happen many more times over game ownership.

An example: the installer for bioshock is 14.6 Gb, uncompressed zip file of the game folder is 20.8 Gb. Installing takes 11 minutes (without integrity check), 500 out 760 files get fragmented so some 9+ minutes on defragmentation (not counting the analysis; using auslogistics disk defrag free). Unpacking the zip file (with 7-zip) takes 5:25, 6 files (directories actually) get fragmented with less than 2 seconds to defragment. Do I need to sum it up? And it's not the biggest game. I plan on getting an ssd, though I'll need a big one which are not super cheap.

That is very true. Was just looking at RDR2 which is said to be around 150gb packed! Of course and alternative is to have a HDD, and then have an ssd with OS/Apps/games to install to, doesn't need to be as big then. My main machine has a 500gb ssd, plus 3 large HDDs as one volume. HDDs for storage, ssd for install. Best of both worlds, although install from ssd is also way faster but you can't have everything.

Be nice if said torrents included intermediate versions/diff files so you had all versions and could play the ones you wanted that might not have been 'fixed' by new bugs.

Yes:)

It's nice having an uncapped connection, but sadly not everyone has a fast uncapped connection & that's why Gog uses the compressed installers.

Also if I may ask: Why do you need to defragment each time? If you just install games and such to said drives and the drive has been previously defragmented then shouldn't huge unfragmented blocks of space be available for new game to install to....thus mitigating fragmentation of said new installs?Why not surf the net or do something else while you wait?You could still use a mechanical larger one for older games and stuff you might need to delete/update/reinstall, and use the SSD for permanent game copies and the OS only, so as to not have such fragmentation problems.

=============================Speaking of bugs....the newest Windows version of Titan Quest(base game) has some bugs. The names for dropped items cascade(multiple boxes with names for one item) sometimes and also the pickup items button(to pickup all stuff nearby) doesn't work no matter which button I assign for it.

I guess I should consider hdd a legacy technology for active usage then as "use an ssd" is an overwhelming response.

Regarding your question, I don't know the actual reason for the fragmentation, the most basic is the design of the ntfs itself of course, but somehow it doesn't depend on the amount of the available contiguous free space. As another example, downloading an installer through gog downloader fragments it much more than downloading through galaxy. Probably it's due to the one downloading many parts in parallel and the other downloading sequentially. The gogrepo.py script popular here is actually a file shredder, I wonder if it's possible to fragment a file more than it does.

IIRC the GOG installers actually decompress and extract files somewhere on your disk before installing them into the right place. That sort of thing might cause fragmentation. Compression itself is not the issue.

It's useful on the whole to use an older HDD(as it gives more space) for games that don't need the extra speed or files you don't mind being fragmented, and an SSD for the stuff one does want to keep unfragmented/games that need the speed/etc....it's the best of both worlds to some degree.

Plus I am guessing if you install to the SSD from installers housed on the HDD it doesn't fragment the SSD(because it's SSD and also it's installing form another volume)? If so that is good for you.

If the site does it better ion not fragmenting installers then use it and one of the tools like jgogdownloader or others(if they are still usable that is...I don't need them myself so I don't know).

Well that sucks.....would what I suggested above(copying installers to another drive and running them off another drive) help with that(i.e. not allow the main drive to get fragmented) or no?

I thought operating systems actively defragmented hard drives while they are not in use otherwise. I am sure you can set standalone degfragmentors to automatically do that too.

You could talk to the developers of Mojosetup if they can do something about improving that part a bit but forget about uncompressed installers. Lots of people have limited internet speeds and data quotas.

You're right there is the scheduled defragmentation, it just isn't likely to happen right after the game install.

For windows installers gog uses inno setup together with rar compression, as I gathered. It's a good idea to talk to the devs though.