Single or Muli WOW dir's

[Kissell13]

I am getting the final pieces needed to begin 5boxing but I need a last bit of advice from you pros out there. I have read the stickies and a bunch of other posts but the info is conflicted in places. So heres my Q. Performance wise what is the best way to install my wow's.

Option 1 - All 5 wows run from 1 single wow install directory

Option 2 - All 5 Wows run from 5 seperate install directories

Option 3 - 2 Seperate WOW directories. 1 for main and 1 for the other 4
This way the main and the other four could have different macro/add on setups

Any help is apreciated
- Kissell13

[Anozireth]

I think many people here have found that one or two directories is much faster than 5, unless you have 5 physical disks. I personally use 2 directories with a symbolic link ('http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link') on the data directory.

[Dinkydau]

I tried running out of five different directories, but every time I took a boat to the other continent, I would get stuck because the loading screen would not go away before the boat took off again. lol

Running out of one directory there is hardly any lag at all on loading screens. It's much faster that way. I haven't tried the symbolic link thing yet, but may give that a try one of these days.

Good luck,

Johnny

[Kissell13]

I think many people here have found that one or two directories is much faster than 5, unless you have 5 physical disks. I personally use 2 directories with a symbolic link ('http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link') on the data directory.OK thanks. Now one more thing. Im very pc literate but have never heard of symbolic link. Any links or info on how to set that up

Thanks again for the help
:thumbsup:

[Djarid]

In Vista There are 2 types of links in use, Symlinks and junctions... symlinks rely on a service to intercept the request and transform it into the correct location on the disk and can point to files or directories, Junctions are actually extra pointers in the NTFS node table and can only point to directories.

Win2K(3) and XP only support junctions

the command in vista is mklink.exe and is built into the operating system... for 5.x you need to download junction.exe

[Havelcek]

That sounds like junctions are faster than symlinks if only because there's one less step in the process...no?

[Djarid]

yes I guess so

[Havelcek]

And there is also a 4th option, which is to run each WoW install on its own hard drive. This is what I'm going to try in my new rig.

[Djarid]

If I could get multiple disks, I would still go for single junctioned installs... here is my reasoning.

say I had 5 disks, I would have:
1x Disk - OS
4x Disks - stripe (RAID0)
I would backup essential data off the stripe onto the system disk.

This would give the benefits of interleaved access from 4 drives and the benefits of the cached data as it would be retrieved from the same physical disk.

[Havelcek]

That's an interesting concept Djarid. Theoretically you would get the benefits of junctioning, while at the same time also having your data seek essentially cut in quarters. At least that's the way I understand the approach.

[ahnubis]

i noticed a huge improvement in performance going from a 5 install to a 2 install

main char with all the addons in wow install 1

then my shamans with their own macros and addons in install 2

loading time on the 4 alts pretty much load in-game at the same exact time, my main lags a bit behind as there are more addons loading but it only takes a few seconds for the alts to load so its still pretty fast.

system is 2x200 7200 RPM in raid 0

[Havelcek]

Article on running Raptors in RAID 0:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101

[Havelcek]

Best Buy currently has the 150gb Raptors on-sale retail-boxed for the same as NewEgg OEM.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7821949&st=raptor&lp=3&type=product&cp=1&id=1142294266684

[Djarid]

If I was not expecting my second child in 4 weeks, I would be sorely tempted (and they had them at the same price in europe)

[Havelcek]

If I was not expecting my second child in 4 weeks, I would be sorely tempted (and they had them at the same price in europe) But you'll need something to store all those new pictures and videos on!

I picked up 2 for safe-keeping.

[Crucial]

Solid state hard disk ftw?

[Chorizotarian]

I think many people here have found that one or two directories is much faster than 5, unless you have 5 physical disks. I personally use 2 directories with a symbolic link ('http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link') on the data directory.OK thanks. Now one more thing. Im very pc literate but have never heard of symbolic link. Any links or info on how to set that up

Thanks again for the help
:thumbsup:

I wrote a script that might help you out:
[Other] PowerShell script to create symbolically linked (mklink) copies of WoW ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=4854')

[Fortis]

If I could get multiple disks, I would still go for single junctioned installs... here is my reasoning.

say I had 5 disks, I would have:
1x Disk - OS
4x Disks - stripe (RAID0)
I would backup essential data off the stripe onto the system disk.
Raid0 doesnt improve WOW performance much. WOW reads many small bits from its datafiles and repositioning/syncing the heads of 4 drives reduces the read performance. RAID0 is good for consecutive data transfer. I had a Raid0 with 4 Barracudadrives and was dissapointed....
For WOW I would suggest one dir and lots of RAM for caching.

[Ryan]

What's the main difference between having a single WoW directory and having two (one for main, one for clones). I currently run out of a single WoW directory and haven't really understood the benefits of going to two directories.

[Dorffo]

For me, the benefit of 2 directories is that I like to run my main instance with different config settings than my other 4 instances. That was the driving force for me to move to separate installs. I went with 5 originally then scaled back to 2 - one for my "main" and one directory for the other 4 (with lower settings etc).

[Djarid]

What Dorffo said, providing you use mklink / Junction for NTFS reparse point for the Data directory at least (specially important on vista to optimise prefetch)