SSD's own

[Harrypott]

Picked up a "G.Skill Falcon2 64M Buffer 64G" yesterday to dedicate to my wow folder. Popped it into an external caddy to copy wow to, copied wow from the WD 650gb green to it at 65mb a sec! over usb 2. The 650gb hard disk isn't too bad a disk either.

Shut down pc, pulled out the 650gb, popped in the SD and proceeded to try out wow.

I run 3 wow instances on that machine and it now loads a million times quicker, I don't think twice about hearthing back to Dal anymore. It used to churn away for some time before, now they are loaded up faster than if I'd hearth to IF etc. Dal would run semi slow because of the extra hard disk activity so it's not too bad there now.

Instances load much better etc too.

I had a fair idea it was my biggest bottleneck for me so very happy with the faster loads and not getting random slowness while the hard disk churns away.

W7 is still running on a 650gb WD black, will have to change that to a SD when I upgrade next to go from W7 32bit to 64bit.

[Nisch]

Yeah, SSD's are the single most cost effective upgrade to my system so far.

[Kalyse]

I'm going to buy the 275 read / 275 write SSD at the end of this month. I can't remember which one it is called.

I did do a lot of research and only really found two which seem good.
I just did a full upgrade for 1.4k and couldn't afford to add the SSD at that time. Glad to see you saw improvements!

You should have done benchmarks before.
I'm hoping to move my windows onto it too, but I'm not sure how I can do that. I was going to look at Acronis

[Kalyse]

OCZ Vertex 2E.
Thats the one.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/225416

Imho, thats the best one on the market at the moment.

Either that orthe corsair C5 which has 350 read but only 80 or so write.

[dozigden]

I just popped an Intel X25-V into my machine yesterday and even a fairly budget SSD like that has made the world of difference to my experience.

[valle2000]

I think any SSD will improve performance. At least if you're 5-boxing, since ordinary hard drives gets a huge work load when all WoWs at the same time needs to load data. I have two SSD and I love them, one for my OS and one for my WoW. It greatly improves Windows performance as well.

[Kalyse]

I'd like to know what the actual benchmark improvement would be, but I don't understand what the scores actually mean when running say 3d vantage.

[Harrypott]

My old computer would load instances first... 2 instances of wow, and my main machine would load 5+ seconds after it... (3 instances of wow). now my new computer seems fast and my old computer is 5+ seconds after it. Can't say I did any benchmarks before / after beyond noticing it go faster. As with any upgrade your mileage will vary depends on your current setup. I'm not sure I've seen a post on here of anyone who didn't love a SSD once they got it though.

[Coolit]

I've got a pair of Crosair performance SSD's in raid 0 and they really are brilliant, even with 5 clients running Dalaran loads instantly. One of the best purchases I've made in a long time.

[drevil]

or go for a PCIE-SSD-Raid card for real speed ;-)

[daviddoran]

What I'm wondering, is if I get 2 SATA II SSDs, and run them in a RAID, on a SATA 6Gb/s port, will I benefit from the newer sata bandwidth? or would I be limited to 3Gb/s?

[roflstomp]

ok so many this is what i need instead of a new pc i can run 10 no problem in dal but when i open 15 i cant go to day or wintergrasp i know this cuz i did tests my cpu is maxed my vcard and mem will suppirt atleast 15
would an ssd lower my prosseser usage?

[Sildenafil]

So do you just load the ssd in a free drive, give it a new drive name, load wow on the new drive, and profit - that simple? Or is there some tweakage that has to be done behind the scenes that a non-power user like myself might not anticipate?

[mikekim]

What I'm wondering, is if I get 2 SATA II SSDs, and run them in a RAID, on a SATA 6Gb/s port, will I benefit from the newer sata bandwidth? or would I be limited to 3Gb/s?

you would still be limited to the 3gb/s bandwith of your motherboard, for maximum speed you would need to get a 6gb/s card

[Catamer]

I tried the PCIE OCZ card and it lasted less than a week :-( . it was fast while it lasted.
I'm now using a raid-0 of the intel SSD and it seems very stable and each drive uses less that 1/10 the power of any conventional drive.

[Sajuuk]

I tried the PCIE OCZ card and it lasted less than a week :-( . it was fast while it lasted.
I'm now using a raid-0 of the intel SSD and it seems very stable and each drive uses less that 1/10 the power of any conventional drive.

I hope you got a refund.

[Harrypott]

ok so many this is what i need instead of a new pc i can run 10 no problem in dal but when i open 15 i cant go to day or wintergrasp i know this cuz i did tests my cpu is maxed my vcard and mem will suppirt atleast 15
would an ssd lower my prosseser usage?

A SSD won't help lower your processor usage

[Harrypott]

So do you just load the ssd in a free drive, give it a new drive name, load wow on the new drive, and profit - that simple? Or is there some tweakage that has to be done behind the scenes that a non-power user like myself might not anticipate?

1. Open case, hook up SSD drive
2. Boot up, windows should see a new drive, need to initalize \ format it. This is done in disk management
3. Copy wow to it
4. modify ISBoxer or what ever software you use
5. play wow

I copied wow to the SSD using an external hdd case, then pulled out the old HDD from my pc and popped in the SSD in it's place, modified the drive letter in windows to be what the old one was so I didn't have to modify my boxing software.

[Sildenafil]

Thanks, didn't think about having to tell IsBoxer to change.

[Greythan]

Any thoughts on the size needed? I have an open bay in the laptop I use to game and I'm cheap. So, looking for advice on minimum comfortable size of an SSD and a specific model recommendation if anyone has one.

Thanks.

[Harrypott]

Any thoughts on the size needed? I have an open bay in the laptop I use to game and I'm cheap. So, looking for advice on minimum comfortable size of an SSD and a specific model recommendation if anyone has one.

Thanks.

size: I went with a 64gb simply because it would fit a single copy of WoW on it, should be big enough for Cat, and It should serve ok to chuck in a media centre pc later to install windows on it and a few apps.

if you plan to put windows on it too then you probably want 128gb or more... Windows is awesome on a SSD, especially on a laptop but takes more effort to get it up and running.

[daviddoran]

you would still be limited to the 3gb/s bandwith of your motherboard, for maximum speed you would need to get a 6gb/s card

You misunderstood, my motherboard has 2 6Gb/s ports on it already. I was just wanting to know if the bandwidth is cumulative for the whole interface, or not.

[daviddoran]

As for size, I think 128GB ones are at a good price point now, and are large enough for most users to be their main drive for windows, and games. If you just want to put wow on one, grab a 32 gb one that has high read speed, and dont worry about the write speed. My plan is to keep buying larger/faster drives for my main pc, and trickle the older ones down to my backup pcs, the wifes pc, etc.

I'd recommend using hard drive cloning software if you have a good working install of windows going. I use Acronis, and it works great. Just plug in only your old drive and the new SSD, boot to the acronis CD, and clone from your old drive to your new one, then unhook the old one, put the new one in its place, hook up everything else, and you are golden. I also use acronis as my backup, to me it seems way more efficient than file based backup.

[Greythan]

David, you use Migrate Easy 7.0? Acronis is new to me and they have a lot of "home" products.

[daviddoran]

I use True Image, I've used the home versions as well as the enterprise versions. Best feature is the "universal restore" it lets you restore an image to dissimilar hardware, which is useful if you upgrade motherboards, and windows BSODs at boot.

[Catamer]

I hope you got a refund.

No, I didn't. No refunds, only replacement. It took two weeks to get a replacement for it and by that time I had purchased the intel drives. (who wants to go pc-less for two weeks) the replacement is brand now and still in the box with plastic wrap.

I was afraid to try it again since I didn't want to go through the hassle of reinstalling the O/S again.

[Greythan]

1. Open case, hook up SSD drive
2. Boot up, windows should see a new drive, need to initalize \ format it. This is done in disk management
3. Copy wow to it
4. modify ISBoxer or what ever software you use
5. play wow
Followed this advice. Newb question here, but I use Vista on my gaming laptop so is there any other optimization I should consider after installing a new 64g SSD? I'm thinking of the old windows swap file if that still applies in Vista, should that be moved to the SSD?

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Followed this advice. Newb question here, but I use Vista on my gaming laptop so is there any other optimization I should consider after installing a new 64g SSD? I'm thinking of the old windows swap file if that still applies in Vista, should that be moved to the SSD?

Two comments:

1) Since you're using an OS without TRIM, as I understand it you need to partition the drive to leave about 15% empty. You can find references for this elsewhere.

2) Putting the swap file on it would probably help your OS general performance under heavy loads. I would have previously said never to put a swap file or your OS on an MLC drive but after seeing some better explanations of the math regarding MLC cell write lifetimes, I suspect you'll be able to buy cheap 1TB SLC SSDs before it wears itself out. ;)

[Greythan]

I could upgrade the OS to Windows 7. (That's what I run on my home desktop, but I game on my Vista-based laptop.) Would that make a performance difference?

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I could upgrade the OS to Windows 7. (That's what I run on my home desktop, but I game on my Vista-based laptop.) Would that make a performance difference?

Yes, because Vista sucks compared to Win7. ;) Otherwise, the SSD performance will be about the same on both.

[burningforce]

depending on what company you went for, they usually have forums you can go to and find a post about configuring SSD as a windows drive. OCZ forums I know have one of these type of posts.

also if you use windows 7, it automatically does some configuring to itself that sets up the SSD when installing windows. I believe it turns off indexing and prefetching, or at least turns down the indexing to not run all the time.

edit* - here is the ocz forum, not sure if all these "tweaks" apply to your SSD or not, but good read through though ;)

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?186-Indilinx-Vertex-Agility-Turbo-Solid-V2-Colossus-and-Z-Drive-with-Microsoft-OS.

[Ualaa]

I found a few similar posts on the forums at http://patriotmemory.com/forums/index.php

[Ellay]

Has anyone tried out SATA 3.0? I'm thinking that is gonna rip it too :P

[boxblizzard]

im using raid on my laptop, dam fast cant see any point upgrading to ssd anytime soon, and thats running 5

[daviddoran]

Has anyone tried out SATA 3.0? I'm thinking that is gonna rip it too :P

you won't see any improvements from SATA 3 unless you get an SSD with speeds over 300MB/S, which they are rapidly approaching. There are already a few out that boast such speeds.

[Boylston]

For the money, I would buy two 30GB drives and RAID-0 them before I'd buy a 64GB drive. Better performance for about the same cost...

[daviddoran]

For the money, I would buy two 30GB drives and RAID-0 them before I'd buy a 64GB drive. Better performance for about the same cost...

I bought 3 60GB OCZ Vertex 2 drives and they are insanely fast. Large enough to install everything, and i just store photos/videos/music on my oldschool drives. Not sure what i wanna do with my velociraptor tho, maybe move it to my backup pc thats still running an old school 74gb raptor...

[BobGnarly]

A while back, I tried an SSD and found it pretty underwhelming. Not to say that my performance sucked and still does, rather it performed pretty well before and getting an SSD didn't really improve it any.

I'm not sure why my results are so difference than yours, but I do have a theory.

I have 12G of RAM in my system, which is really overkill for 5 wow clients. However, I know that Vista/Win7 caches disk accesses to RAM using a paging scheme not unlike UNIX swap (meaning, once something is pulled in off disk, it is left in RAM until a program needs that RAM). My theory is that, once the first client loads the data off disk, there is so much RAM idling about that it just stays in RAM for all the clients. In essence, wow is in a ramdrive. Therefore, I was only observing the increase from the SSD once, upon initial load.

Anyway, it's just a theory, but I thought I'd mention it because it was a surprise to me, and I'm really happy having the extra ram for things like video editing anyway.

[daviddoran]

Could have been the ssd, they are not created equally. A lot of the cheap ones are barely faster than a raptor, and you're right, a system with a lot of ram won't see as much of an improvement as one with say 2GB RAM.

My biggest plus to using an SSD is loading/hearthing/zoning in, it all happens much quicker on the ssd than it did when i used raptors, one velociraptor for my main wow folder and the OS, and another older raptor for the 4 alts.