A great optimization tip picked up on the development thread of Jaga Telesin’s ORB – it is possible to spread your .bsa files across multiple hard drives.
Simply create a (short name) folder on other hard-drives you may have in your machine and move heavily used .bsa files to these folders.
For example, I created a : E:\TES and G:\TES folder on two of my additional drives (Oblivion itself is installed on H:\Games\Oblivion).
Once the files are copied in these folders, you still have to edit your Oblivion.ini file to add the new path to the corresponding .bsa files (edit the line with : sArchiveList=).
Here is a detailed explanation from Jaga about this tip.
ORB stands for Oblivion Resource Balancing. After the amazing Streamline 3.1, Jaga’s new project aims at creating a set of .bsa files and distribute them across multiple hard-drives for optimal performance.
This is one project to watch closely…
Note:
When using multiple hard drives, people should make sure that their Power Management settings are set to Never put hard drives to sleep.
It should be obvious with hindsight, but I found out that my system was set to put HDs to sleep after 20 minutes, which translated with occasional lags when Oblivion tried to access .bsa files on a drive that needed to be ‘awakened’.
Also, under Vista, I saved valuable resources by disabling the Indexing service on all unnecessary drives, especially the drives hosting my .bsa files.