FIT Contributor Best Practice

The resulting graphs look the same if you do a setData() every compute cycle, or if you add a little logic to only write your user data to the FIT file if the value has changed. So that could mean tens of thousands of fewer writes.

Just curious if that saves FIT file size and/or device processor work (battery drain, better data field response time). Or, does the device write the old value in each device activity (every second or every SMART recording interval) anyway?

In other words, is there any benefit to writing user data only when the value changes, or just do it every cycle regardless?