I have searched the forums and Google and read MANY posts on this topic, however none addressed adequately the specific questions I have regarding this issue.

I have personally gotten into the habit of using BSAopt to extract all mod files that come in BSA's and creating custom Wrye installer archives of them. That way I can easily see what is conflicting with what, make sure the version I want loads lower in Wrye's installer list, or directly perform surgery on mod content to remove conflicts (mostly with textures) so I KNOW the version I want is what the game is using.

The main question I have is one of performance. To my way of thinking, having loose files in the game directory could theoretically be faster than having a ton of BSA's (especially ones that are exceedingly large like the HD texture DLC for example), since they are already "readable" whereas BSA files I believe introduce some level of compression which would potentially introduce additional CPU overhead in extracting the needed content on the fly.

Being a rather CPU intensive game (and having not the latest CPU technology) this is a concern for me.

On the other hand, having files packed in a BSA -may- tend to keep content in one region of the HD (if like me you still use platter-based storage technology), which again could theoretically improve performance vs. loose files fragmented all over the disk.

In considering this I opted for loose files as I simply defrag my drive regularly, plus in my mind the performance loss to decompression on the CPU would potentially be greater than that of the seek time on a hard drive, and more critical to game stability as the system competes for threads, potentially resulting in more significant impact than the familiar load stutter from the hard drive, which I don't really get much anyway with a 10,000 RPM drive.

So, I thought I would open this issue again and ask others what they have been doing or recommend. Also if there are other issues to consider aside from raw performance, I would certainly appreciate some clarification.

Some specific caveats I am interested in hearing people's opinions on are the Unoficial Patches. Some contain a "seq" folder with .seq files that I have no idea what they are for, or if they need to be loaded via BSA to work properly since I've never seen them in any other mod I use.