Managing Mods and Transferring Everything to a Larger Hard Drive
I recently had to move my AC install from a 500GB SSD to a 1TB SSD. Even with LZX compression, my 500GB drive was already maxed out. This is because of all the wonderful mods being shared by the community, and a lot of work from the contributors to this thread.
I'm sharing some info and the software I used while this is all still fresh in my mind.
DISCLAIMER: Be careful and perform these suggested operations at your own risk. This is not the end all, be all guide on how to do this. Others may use different procedures and software.
LZX Compression
If you have Windows 10, LZX is an excellent compression algorithm. Not only do you benefit from it's 3 to 1 compression and free up hard drive space, if you have a faster processor, it does speed up launching sessions. To oversimplify what it does, the files are smaller and load faster from the drive, then the CPU decompresses them into memory.
Every time you use either option, it scans first for any files that are not already compressed, and only compresses those. So when you install new mods, you can run this compression routinely, and even select folders full of mods, most already compressed and some not. The fewer new mods you've installed, the less time it will take to compress them.
For compressing your AC mods, you have two options.
Option 1: Use the
compression tool in Content Manager. This can be found on the Content > Tools screen (lower left in image below). LZX is selected as the default compression. Unless I'm wrong, I think this only scans and compresses DDS and Kn5 files in the cars and tracks folder. There are also other folders to compress to save even more space--more on that in Option 2.
Note the impressive compression stats and pie chart.
Option 2: Use
CompactGUI[2]. This allows you to compress any folder you select, whether it be everything installed in your cars folder, or just one, newly installed mod. It can also be used to compress other folders in Assetto Corsa, such as the extension, textures, drivers, or any other folders that contain DDS and Kn5 files. DON'T FORGET these, as compressing these will substantially free up hard drive space.
Click on the light blue bars to select the folders to compress.
You can
download CompactGUI[2] here.
Cloning Hard Drives
It's usually not a good idea to just copy files from one hard drive to another, ESPECIALLY If you've used LZX. In additional to other issues, when files are copied in Windows 10, apparently they're decompressed as they're written to the other drive. You may have 1.3GB compressed onto a 500GB drive, and if you try to transfer everything to a 1TB drive, it will fail. For this process, you need good drive cloning software.
Below are the control panel and utilities I used, and to successfully clone a 500 GB SSD full of compressed content to a 1TB drive takes about three to four hours, mostly waiting as the processes are completing. HDD drives will take a little longer.
Formatting New Drives, Extending Partitions, and Changing Drive Letters
If you buy and install a new HDD or SSD, you will first need to format it. In Windows, search for "Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions." Select it, and this will load the Disk Management control panel. In the lower section, your new drive should appear with a gray bar-not blue as in the example below. If you right-click on it, select "Format" in the popup menu and perform a Quick format. There's an option for a more thorough format, if you feel it's necessary. If the drive is new, this usually isn't necessary, and it takes much longer to complete.
You may also need to return to this control panel to extend the partition that was created by the cloning software. For example, if you clone a 500GB drive to a 1TB drive, you'll likely end up with two partitions, and the drive in the control panel will show a gray area to the right. Simply right-clicking and selecting to extend the partition will allow you to use the drive as one single partition.
You should also return to this control panel to reassign drive letters. More on that below.
IMPORTANT: When using these utilities and following these steps,
be very careful to select the correct hard drive. If you're not, you could format or clone to the wrong drive, and loose software or other files.
Cloning Software: Macruim Reflect. This is an excellent utility, there's a free version, and it's quite easy to use. Below each drive it finds on your system, there's an option to "Clone this disk..." Carefully follow the steps, and again, select the correct drive to clone to. Once cloning begins, and if you're cloning a drive with a lot of content, you can find something else to do away from the PC, but check the status bar during the process.
Macruim Reflect download link
DON'T FORGET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
THE NEXT-TO-LAST STEP--extend the partition. Read the paragraph above, just before the Disk Management control panel image.
THE LAST STEP
After you've successfully cloned your drive, then physically removed the old drive (you may also leave it installed-more below), leaving the new drive in place, you need to assign the drive letter of the old drive to the new drive. If you do this immediately after the physical swap and turning the PC back on, Steam and other software or utilities that were referring to the old drive should refer to the new drive correctly. I did this, and had no issues whatsoever. Steam immediately saw the drive as if nothing changed, and all shortcuts to software and content on the drive work exactly as they did before.
To do this, return to the Disk Management control panel, right-click on the drive, select "Change Drive Letter and Paths..." and select the correct drive letter. It's okay to give the drive a different name, as long as the letter is correct. If you wish to continue using the old drive, be sure to assign a different drive letter to it first, then it frees up that letter to assign it to the new drive. After re-assigning drive letters, I recommend restarting your PC, just so it "readjusts" to the changes.
Identifying Physical Hard Drives
During this process, and especially if you have a lot of hard drives installed in your PC,
CrystalDiskInfo is an excellent utility, and it's free (make a donation if you can). In addition to evaluating and reporting the status of the installed drives, it provides the manufacture name (if it's correct on the drive), the serial number, and other information. This makes it much easier to identify the physical drives when opening up the PC to remove or replace them. When you launch it, give it a minute to scan and assess your installed drives, especially if you have several installed.
CrystalDiskInfo Download Link. There's a lot of spam and some misleading download buttons on this page. The smaller blue buttons under the three Editions are what you're looking for. I downloaded and installed the Standard Edition--not sure what the others offer, other than background graphics.
Suggested Accessory Peripheral
This hard drive docking station, or something similar to it, is very useful for transferring data, or cloning and testing drives.
http://www.kingwin.com/storage/docking-stations/ezd-2535u3-2
