Mod recommendation : Sound Fix for Large Sector Drives

[Enla]

Hello, as some people might know Skyrim can be scuffed when it comes to audio, and particularly the player sfx. This often stems from one main thing :

The hard drive on which Skyrim is installed is not formatted with the proper sector size. Since the game was released on Windows 7, the only sector size possible was 512 bytes. Now it can go up to 4096, which can make Skyrim fail to read many of the audio files. After this issue drove me insane for quite a bit I finally found a mod that fixes it :

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/71567

 

It seems like it does not cause any issues with the STEP guide, but I think it could be wise if it were to be tested by other people as well.

[DoubleYou]

All my drives use 512 bytes/sector so I don't think I can test easily, but ianpatt is a good RE so probably doesn't hurt to add. My only concern is if it causes issues with 512 byte drives? But that I can probably test easily enough, since all of mine are 512.

[z929669]

I also use 512 bytes/sector on all of my drives, and I believe this is the default under all versions of Windows. Using > 512 wastes space with many small files, so it's generally recommended to use 512 on the OS drive. I had experimented with using sectors as small as 4 bytes to maximize storage capacity. Maybe a good thing for pure backup drives, but probably a performance hit on the OS or game drives.

This mod might benefit a very small subset of users, but probably n/a for 99% of them. It's good to have this topic though, as I recall just recently someone posting about sound issues, and it may have been related to large sectors.

[Greg]

11 hours ago, z929669 said:

I had experimented with using sectors as small as 4 bytes to maximize storage capacity.

I may be wrong, but I imagine the overhead of tracking cluster allocations and file system objects would negate any gains with a 4-byte cluster size?

[Enla]

15 hours ago, z929669 said:

I also use 512 bytes/sector on all of my drives, and I believe this is the default under all versions of Windows. Using > 512 wastes space with many small files, so it's generally recommended to use 512 on the OS drive. I had experimented with using sectors as small as 4 bytes to maximize storage capacity. Maybe a good thing for pure backup drives, but probably a performance hit on the OS or game drives.

This mod might benefit a very small subset of users, but probably n/a for 99% of them. It's good to have this topic though, as I recall just recently someone posting about sound issues, and it may have been related to large sectors.

I did post about sound issues recently but that was in an unrelated thread I made, though i think it could be a great addition as I spent more than a week searching for an answer and I tried many inconclusive fixes before finally stumbling on it. I'm aware most people are using 512 bytes cluster size and MBR drives, but Skyrim seems to have issues with anything differing from that. My drives are in GPT as it would otherwise cause bootloading issues when I use Linux.
 

After double checking, my cluster size is 512, but in MBR. It seems like this mod could benefit more people than I first thought ?

4 hours ago, Greg said:

I may be wrong, but I imagine the overhead of tracking cluster allocations and file system objects would negate any gains with a 4-byte cluster size?

I don't think so, just that your transfers might be slower than using 512 or 4096 ?