What will yield better boxing performance?

i have been reading some peoples builds and i have noticed some have one HDD per instance of WoW they are running. i was wondering if this would prove to yield better performance than having an SSD with WoW loaded onto it and then symlinking copies of it to a raid0 array of 7200 rpm HDD's. another option would be having an SSD symlinking WoW to one HDD for each instance of WoW. the only problem would be getting a case that fits 7+ HDD's (1x SSD, 5x WoW HDD's, and one more for the OS). i guess that wouldn't really be a problem actually, most full tower/mid tower cases can store that many.

if you have experience with multiple HDD arrays, such as differnt kinds/ setups, could you tell me what arrangement/combination put out the best performance?

All advice and info on this would be of great help!

Thanks everybody! ^_^

~YYF

if money is not an issue, get different pc's for each instance of wow? else, the cpu, ram and gfx card can probably be a bottleneck for maximising the capabilities of multiple wow instances and ssd+raid would never really reach its full potential?

in my new build i'm looking at a core i7, 12G of RAM and 2x Radeon HD 4870 1G cards so GPU's, CPU and RAM isn't a problem. as of right now i do not feel like going hardware because in a couple years i am going to be going to college and i would like a decen't computer i can take with me. maybe i will change my mind but idk, right now i am sticking to 5 on 1 comp.

Thanks for the input though. ^_^

~YYF

This may not be a deal breaker but...

One thing you might want to bear in mind is that most if not all onboard raid controllers only tend to feature just a couple of channels.

I'm not quite sure I understand your raid0 setup (it's early morning, everything is all blurry :P) but if you were looking to get maximum scaling bandwidth out of the raid0 drives then you will need a pci express raid card as most onboard raid chipsets only have two channels. Four channel cards tend to be rather expensive, I'd hate to think how much the next iteration (6 or 8 channel?) would cost. You could of course just split the drives between the two channels most motherboard raid chipsets now sport, resulting in roughly double the bandwidth of running the drives in ide mode.

FYI I run two OCZ V2 64GB SSDs in raid0 and have benched raid array read performance at 280MB/s across the majority of file sizes (this is considerably better than an identical array using raptor disks). Four slaves run off one copy of wow and the main runs off a seperate copy. This is on a core i7 920/6GB.

hmm i didn't think about that lol thanks for pointing that out. i will have to look into raid0 with a couple SSD's. from what i have read on these forums and in some other places though is that i shouldn't put the OS on them because they have a kind of low write time, so should i just get a seperate HDD just for the OS and any other programs i might put on the computer?

Thanks for the input it has helped alot. ^_^

~YYF

I run XP64 on my SSDs without issue. Applications load instantly and the general feel of the system is much faster than on a platter based drive.

Many people have issues with freezing and stuttering when using an OS on SSDs so I think the results can be mixed, depending heavily on your hardware and OS flavour. Using a normal platter drive will be the most reliable option for now, until Windows 7 appears on the scene with certified SSD compatability. Couple that with an SSD array for your wow clients and you've got probably the best drive setup for multiboxing wow in todays harsh dalaran-like environment :)

With yer current i7 12 gigs of ram jumping to a raid setup will only get yeh a marginal improvement and only when yeh load the game, load into an instance, go into a high pop area with lots of npcs.

One mid to high end ssd drive will out perform any raid setup due to seek times being better, thru put really isn't an issue with wow.

Why dont yeh just skip all the raid stuff and get
http://www.dvnation.com/Fusion-IO-IO...isk-Drive.html

Or just get a decent ssd drive Intel X25-M?