^I'm on core i7 16GB, 30 TB plots on 8 external USB 3 drives. The optimization is ordering your plots in a way that each block it reads sequential from your HDD with much less seeks. HDDs are much, much faster with sequential reading. When some of the plots are optimized and others are not you can't see a big difference, but when they are all optimized you'll read your plots much faster.
I did a 1 optimized vs a 1 unoptimized comparison on two different systems and both unoptimized drives were faster. I just did 2x optimized vs 2x unoptimized and the unoptimized pair were still faster. I can imagine the unoptimized drives are even faster with more memory and a higher stagger size.
Watching the reading numbers in resource monitor, the unoptimized drives read faster then the optimized drives as per my screenshot on the last page, which I confirmed on two different systems.
I understand what 'optimizing' is supposed to do (sequential vs random seeks), but it doesn't seem to be doing it, I messed up the optimization somehow, or I'm supposed to tweak Blagos miner somehow to better utilize the optimized plots. If a disk goes from mainly random seeks to sequential transfers, it should be much, much faster, especially on my 5900RPM drives, it's not doing that though. That should be a given regardless the number of disks on the system.
Sequential throughput on these drives is from 80-180MB/s. It's reading the optimized disks at 10MB/s.
Also worth mentioning, these are 5TB drives.
It could very well be that my systems are too slow to properly utilize the optimized drives, however, the unoptimized drives shouldn't be faster. I mean I'm not making this stuff up, I'm reading this out of resource monitor and looking at the mine times on Blagos.
This may have something to do with the unoptimized drives still using a stagger, while the optimized ones no longer use a buffer(stagger?). Is there anyway to force a optimized drive to continue to use a buffer?