Optimizing HDD (speed-wise) in windows 7 (multipe hdd present in a pc)

[madScientist]

Quest
Speed up WOW in windows 7

Requirements
Two or more hard-drives in a pc

General
The slowest part of a pc is the hard drive, by far. I run 5 wow's on a single pc and the loading times kill my fun sometimes. Once the loading finishes things go ok until the next loading phase (i've got plenty of ram to avoid swap).

Time needed
From 10 to 40 minutes, depending on how many hard drives you want to use.

Computer operating skill required
Around average, it's a simple operation.

Solution
Windos 7 allows the user to create a "RAID Stripped" partition. This means that the partition will occupy space on multiple hard-drives and the data will be written in a round-robin fashion to all of them.

Pro: faster read/write

Con: if one hard drives fails you loose all the data

Anti-Con: create a small partition so you loose only the wow files, not the whole drives.

Important
This is a software-only solution.
No messing with BIOS or raid hardware needed


I do not advise begginers to convert the the hdd with windows to dynamic if
- you have more than one OS installed (dual-booting or more)
- you want to install older OS'es (win xp and lower) or linux

If you have 3 drives, just use the second and third one to be on the safe side (first one is considered the one with drive C:\


Results
15-45% faster loading times.
I personally jumped from 1 minute and a half to 20 seconds of loading time when all my toons teleport to a busy dalaran

How to

Step 1. Convert disk to DYNAMIC DISKS

Log on as Administrator or as a member of the Administrators group.
Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
Click Performance and Maintenance, Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer Management.
In the left pane, click Disk Management.
In the lower-right pane, right-click the basic disk that you want to convert, and then click Convert to Dynamic Disk.
NOTE:You must right-click the gray area that contains the disk title on the left side of the Details pane. For example, right-click Disk 0.
Select the check box that is next to the disk that you want to convert (if it is not already selected), and then clickOK.
Click Details if you want to view the list of volumes in the disk.
Click Convert.
Click Yes when you are prompted to convert, and then click OK.

Step 2. Resize the last partition to create space for a new partition.
- Let's say we need a maximum of 30 GB of data for wow and addons and everything else
- we have 3 hard drives, so we need 30 / 3 = 10 gb on each drive, if we had 6, we'd need 5 gb / drive
- this will take the most time, so have patience! do not end task, reboot or try to stop the process.

1. Open the Control Panel (All Items view), and click on the Administrative Tools icon. then close the Control Panel window.

2. Click on Computer Management in Administrative Tools, then close the Administrative Tools window.

3. In the left pane under Storage, click on Disk Management.

4. In the middle pane, right click on the partition that you want to shrink and click on Shrink Volume.

5. Type in how many MB (1 GB = 1024 MB) of the available shrink space shown that you want to shrink the partition or volume by to be used for the new unallocated space, then click on the Shrink button.

6. The selected partition (step 4) has now been shrunk to create a new empty unallocated space. You can use this new unallocated space to create a new partition with.

Full tutorial here, with images http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...me-shrink.html


Step 3. Create a new STRIPED partition using ALL the "empty" space on all drives (and format it with ntfs, not compressed)

[QUOTE]
1. Open the Control Panel (All Items view), and click on the Administrative Tools icon. then close the Control Panel window.

2. Click on Computer Management in Administrative Tools, then close the Administrative Tools window.

3. In the left pane under Storage, click on Disk Management.

4. Right click on the empty space on one of the partitions and select NEW STRIPED VOLUME

5. Add all the available free space

6. When asked to format leave it at default (NTFS, not compressed)
[QUOTE]

Step 4. Copy everything to the new partition
- use whatever you're confortable with

Step 5. Profit

Step 6. Maybe leave a thanks if you feel it was useful to you

a madScientist experiment!

[madScientist]

[kept for future editing, just in case]

[Ughmahedhurtz]

[edit] Nevermind.
[edit2] Just for clarity's sake, my original question was, "How did you deal with changing your BIOS from AHCI to RAID mode on the disk controller?" Well, after some checking on the process, it appears this is all OS-based. Be sure you read and understand what he's showing you before you go making changes or you could get the system into an unbootable (looping BSOD 0x7B) state. :P

Moral of the story: backup early, backup often. And do your research.

[madScientist]

This is a software-only solution. No messing with BIOS or raid hardware needed. CPU useage is under 1% so you don't loose on that part. If you have 3 drives, you can convert just two of them and keep the bootable one (the one with windows) as basic to be on the save side.

You should have left the question. It's was good one!

[Starbuck_Jones]

Software raid is better than nothing, but only if you have the cpu and ram to do it. Driver based raid is a better as most motherboards these days support it. Full hardware raid with a dedicated controller on paper is the best, but these days with cheap 8-12 core cpu's it doesnt justify the cost of a controller unless it offers a feature you cant get anywhere else like raid 5, 10, 50 etc. or downtime reduction like hot swap capabilities.

Ive been out of the hardware support game for almost a year now, but when I left, RAID + SSD's did not mix very well due to the garbage routines that SSD's use to clean up their deleted areas as well as their wear leveling routines.

Dont get me wrong, ssd is better than a traditional drive. Raid can be better than non raid, so why not use both. Just do some research before you spend $$.

[madScientist]

This a solution for when wow is hard-drive-limited. The windows 7 software raid uses less than 1% of a current dual-core cpu. And it's free . So why not use it?