Will adding more hard drives and moving wow folders to said drives speed up performance?

[knopstr]

Here are my hardware specs:

XFX Ultra 790sli MB
Intel Quad-Core Extreme (Yorkfield)
4gbs of 1600ddr3 Memory running on XP pro
1gb Nvidia video card

My question is as stated in the subject line:

Will adding more hard drives and moving wow folders to said drives speed up performance?

Currently I have decent frame rates and little lag to speak of except in Dalaran. I can move all 5 shamans around with relative ease -- occasional glitch now and again but nothing show stopping. Last night I tried WG (winterlag) for the 1st time and I was shocked that I could barely move, let alone participate. Is there a chance that adding the additional drives will boost performance?

Thanks for your help

[Sajuuk]

A solid state hard drive can provide a sizable performance increase. Even the less expensive MLC drives (30Gb OCZ SSDs go for about 90 dollars)

[knopstr]

What I'm asking is will placing individual wow folders on different hard drives improve game performance?

[Yo-Yo Freak]

if i understand your question right then yes, moving your wow folders off of the HDD that hosts the OS could improve performance. if you are thinking about getting another HDD i would highly recommend an SSD. for multi-boxing all we care about is access times. like Sajuuk said you only need a cheap 30G or so 1 that can be had for around $70-90. wow only takes up about 15G of space so 30G is more then enough. you will have to symlink your wow folders but you should do that already even w/o another HDD.

BUT. and this is a big 1. from the specs you listed above. your best upgrade would be 4G more RAM. if your motherboard can support 8G of RAM and you have a 64-bit OS then go with 4G more ram before anything else.

WoW is very RAM intensive. 8G is just about a must for wotlk.

hope this helps some.

~YYF

[Sam DeathWalker]

Putting one wow folder on each drive will not much, putting a single wow folder on raidzero multiple drives will much more.

Access time is very important if wow has character textures scattered all over the data folder. How do you know that wow does not load all character texters into your video card in sequenctial (no random access time needed, only bandwidth) order?

[Greythan]

Off topic: I'd venture to guess that going to a 64 bit OS and upgrading RAM would be a bigger boost. (Agree with Yo Yo)

[knopstr]

Fur,

Yes, your assumption about what I was wanting to try was correct. Thanks for pointing it out for the others.

Let's try this again...for optimal game performance based on further reading, here's my new plan.

1) Begrudgingly put Vista64 (which I bought and shelved) on say a new 10,000rpm drive.
a) Place Operating system and other management programs here.

2) Format 2 seagate 750's that I have. Put these in raid0 format.
b) Install 5 copies of WoW here and symlink the WTF/data/and what else?

3) Drive clear across Austin to Fry's Electronics and pray the kids there can find 4gb's of ram to match what I bought 6 months ago...LOL...

Boot it all up and pray the lag in WG goes away. What say you all? Did I leave any steps out? I'm worried about the memory. Chances are that I won't be able to match the Corsair that I have. If that's the case, what do I do next? Not to keen on buying 8gb's when I already have 4. The original reason I bought 4 was that I hadn't intended to go to Vista.

Thanks for your comments...keep em coming.

[Owltoid]

Fur,

Yes, your assumption about what I was wanting to try was correct. Thanks for pointing it out for the others.

Let's try this again...for optimal game performance based on further reading, here's my new plan.

1) Begrudgingly put Vista64 (which I bought and shelved) on say a new 10,000rpm drive.
a) Place Operating system and other management programs here.

2) Format 2 seagate 750's that I have. Put these in raid0 format.
b) Install 5 copies of WoW here and symlink the WTF/data/and what else?

3) Drive clear across Austin to Fry's Electronics and pray the kids there can find 4gb's of ram to match what I bought 6 months ago...LOL...

Boot it all up and pray the lag in WG goes away. What say you all? Did I leave any steps out? I'm worried about the memory. Chances are that I won't be able to match the Corsair that I have. If that's the case, what do I do next? Not to keen on buying 8gb's when I already have 4. The original reason I bought 4 was that I hadn't intended to go to Vista.

Thanks for your comments...keep em coming.

Or go with an SSD drive

[Bovidae]

If you have 4g ram, and 1g video memory on a 32 bit OS, you're not getting your full potential. Install that Vista x64 you got and you should see an improvement.

It sounds like you already have 2 Seagate 750's. While a raid0 of these would give better speeds than a single drive, you will have a 1.5tb drive that you really only need 20gb of for WoW. using your existing harddrives, I'd use one for OS/apps, and the other for your 5xWoW+symlinked data directory. This should also give you a good improvement.

If you want to buy a single Raptor (or SSD) I'd use it for the WoW installs only. This should give you a large improvement. (this is what I did)

GET MORE RAM (nuff said)

[Maxion]

Or get Windows XP 64 bit version...

At least it is supposed to exist. (i want it)