I haven't found any asynchronous IOPS numbers on HDDS anywhere. The internet IOPs are just 1000ms/seek time with a 8ms seek time for moving from the outer to the inner track, which is only really relevant for the synchronous file IO case.

For asynchronous IO you can just do inward/outward passes to amortize the seek time over multiple files.

While it may not have been obvious, I have taken archiving or bundling of assets into a bigger file for granted. The obvious benefit is that the HDD knows that it should store game files continuously. This has nothing to do with file duplication though and is a somewhat irrelevant topic, because it costs nothing and only has benefits.

The asynchronous file IO case for bundled files is even better, since you can just hand over the internal file offsets to the async file IO operations and get all the relevant data in parallel so your only constraint is deciding on an optimal lower bound for the block size, which is high for HDDs and low for SSDs.

>I haven't found any asynchronous IOPS numbers on HDDS anywhere. The internet IOPs are just 1000ms/seek time with a 8ms seek time for moving from the outer to the inner track, which is only really relevant for the synchronous file IO case.

>For asynchronous IO you can just do inward/outward passes to amortize the seek time over multiple files.

Here's a random blog post that has benchmarks for a 2015 HDD:

https://davemateer.com/2020/04/19/Disk-performance-CrystalDi...

It shows 1.5MB/s for random 4K performance with high queue depth, which works out to just under 400 IOPS. 1 queue depth (so synchronous) performance is around a third.

>I haven't found any asynchronous IOPS numbers on HDDS anywhere.

As the other user stated, just look up Crystal Disk Info results for both HDDs and SSD and you'll see hard drives do about 1/3rd of a MBPs on random file IO while the same hard drive will do 400MBps on a contiguous read. For things like this reading a zip and decompressing in memory is "typically" (again, you have to test this) orders of magnitude faster.